A Box of Matches (5 page)

But now that it is iron-cold, cold enough that we worry about how she manages at night, fluffed in with her cedar shavings, even with the blanket over the doghouse and the snow on the blanket, she has not been immersed in any sort of water for weeks. I hope her feathers don’t lose their insulative properties when she can’t bathe. Her
feet, which you would think would be vulnerable to frostbite when she stands on the ice, seem unaffected. When one foot begins to feel intolerably cold, she just pulls it up into her feathers and stands balanced on the other. Then she switches.

Good morning, it’s 4:45 a.m. Yesterday my son and I got haircuts from Sheila in town. I like her because she’s fast and she doesn’t care that I have what Claire calls a “roundabout,” meaning that I’m well on my way to being bald. Nor does she want to give my son a shelf haircut. She’s a person who just likes cutting people’s hair. There you have it—just snipping locks all day long and sweeping the piles into garbage bags. My son gets a solemn expression when he’s having a haircut. I looked at him in the mirror, sitting with his wet hair in the big salon chair with the white clerical collar on him—eight years old, noticeably taller than last time, with good straight shoulders and a straight back—and I wanted to make low animal noises, growlings, of love for him. I can’t call him
pet names like “Dr. Van Deusen” anymore in public, he has forbidden me. I now must call him simply Henry. Henry it is. I asked Sheila what she thought of the siding that was going up on the old Congregational church in town. She nodded approvingly and said, “Low maintenance.”

Sometimes if Sheila’s closed or booked up, Henry and I go to Ronnie’s barbershop. The first year we lived here, we went to Ronnie’s father, also named Ronnie, a man who nodded and pursed his lips as he snipped. The father retired and the son took over. The son scowls all the time; he’s one of those people whose mouth falls into a scowl, although in fact he’s fairly upbeat. He uses his father’s old-fashioned cash register, which makes a ringing sound when you push down the keys. But it’s a very long wait in Ronnie’s shop, because his prices are low and he gets a lot of business from the military bases nearby. I don’t like watching these army people get their hair cut. They want it “skinned” and flat-topped. Their heads rise up off of thick necks and they narrow at the top like medium-range missiles, and as Ronnie uses the shaver on them, folds of back-of-head skin begin to reveal themselves. The back of a man’s head is not meant to be seen: there is
something repulsive, almost evil, about the place where the skull meets the top of the spine. Old scars, too—Ronnie’s shaver’s dispassionate teeth move back and forth over a white, C-shaped scar, grinding away the hair.

I asked Ronnie why people want their hair so short, and he said it was convenience. “People don’t want to spend time with their hair.” Ronnie is mistaken, I think. These men are self-primpers. Every two weeks they are willing to drive all the way to Oldfield and wait for an hour in a chair, staring at their enormous square knees, insisting that their hair be as short as it can possibly be; whereas I get mine cut, and then I forget about it for five months. They seem to enjoy the prickliness—you see them fondling their skulls when they walk out the door. Marines, so Ronnie told me, generally want their hair mown shorter than any other group of military men. They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeringness. I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father, and a few others. Robert Service, the poet, I like. Anyway, that’s why Henry and I usually go to have our haircuts at Sheila’s.

Good morning, it’s 5:07 a.m. I’m snoring a lot, and it’s keeping Claire awake. She used to say that it was her bedside light that bothered me, but it’s gone beyond that now. Probably I snore because I have more fat on the end of my epiglottis, making it floppier.

My grandfather was a great snorer. In his youth, he had ambitions to find a cure for some major disease, which brought him to medical school, and he ended up a research pathologist specializing in fungal diseases of the nose and brain. When I was fifteen, he began paying me to help him proofread his gigantic and wondrously expensive book,
Fungal Disease in Humans
. My grandmother had finally said, after twenty years of
doing proofreading and correspondence for him, that she’d had enough. I became one of the few teenagers who could spell
rhinoentomophthoromycosis—
“rhino” because the malady begins in the nose. A number of the diseases that my grandfather studied had first appeared in the early nineteen-fifties after overeager pharmacologists, wanting to believe that steroids were the new miracle drugs, administered them in huge doses, sometimes in African and South American countries. Dosed with a sufficiently heavy course of some corticosteroids, one’s immune system stops functioning, and then the hyphae, or creepers, of normally innocent organisms like bread mold take root and grow through the veins and arteries and into the brain, causing blockages and dead places. The pictures of the doomed sufferers are horrible.

My grandfather’s other textbook was a compendium of tips and tricks for doing better postmortem examinations, copiously illustrated by a nice man who loved houseplants, and printed on special paper that could be rinsed if you got blood and gook on it. The way to make steady money in the textbook business is to bring out a new edition of your book every two years, whether
it needs it or not. Otherwise your book competes with all the used copies of your book that are available for resale. I helped my grandfather with these successive editions, and then, after my job-hunting leads didn’t pan out, he got me a position at the publishing company that had brought out his books. And now twenty years later what am I? I’m an editor of medical textbooks. The job pays seventy thousand dollars a year and it isn’t terribly difficult. Of course doctors are smart in many ways, but a lot of them are also, in my experience, silly credulous people who need to be told what to think by a textbook, until a different textbook tells them to think differently.

Once when I was just married, I read an Agatha Christie and two Dick Francises, and I thought I should get up early and write a murder mystery about fungal diseases. I imagined a plot like an elaborate machine—like one of those works of mechanical art in airports, in which billiard balls move around on wire tracks, turning windmills and setting off chimes. I filled a silver glass—one of a pair that had been a wedding present—with cold water, and I took a piece of soft wheat bread from out of the bag, and I went to a chair by a window, where I sat
looking at the streetlit sunrise, and tried to write about fungus-related death. The condensation on the silver water glass made patterns that I studied closely: it grew a fuzz of tiny droplets, like a reindeer’s antler, and then one droplet would break ranks and join with another, and suddenly a bigger dome of a drop, which had sucked in some of its surrounding fuzz and become too heavy to hold its place on the silver surface, slid down an inch, then gathered more strength and, changing direction to avoid an invisible point of resistance, slid another inch. Eventually there were five or six of these trails, and as I sipped the water the lowering of the level of the liquid would influence the texture of the droplets and the trails on the outer surface.

So I sat looking out at the dim world, eating wheat bread and drinking cold water, hoping to come up with a first chapter, where the dead body is discovered. I wrote fourteen pages. Then Claire and I began to notice a puzzlingly sweetish smell in our apartment. It got worse. We told the building manager that we suspected that a raccoon had died on the roof. The manager walked the roof and found nothing. Then came the hideous black
flies, the biggest I’d ever seen. The woman next door stuffed a towel in the crack under her door to block the stench. We thought maybe the solid-waste plant down the road had had a mishap. But it turned out that the man below us had died. I thought, I don’t want to write a murder mystery with a plot like a machine; I don’t want a corpse lying there pushing a little imaginary world into gear.

The Postmortem Handbook
, my grandfather’s small but steady seller, was translated into Spanish. He believed that what the world needed, above all, was more autopsies. He told us this at Christmas and he told us this at Thanksgiving; he told us this while sitting on a deck chair cruising up the Rhine. Better diagnoses, handier surgeons, wiser doctors, happier patients, all would result from more autopsies. In his will he ordered that an autopsy be performed on his body, as indeed it was. But once he said to me: “Fluorescent light is bad for the eyes. Pick a life that gets you outdoors.” I work all day in fluorescent light; it isn’t so bad. But maybe that’s why I crave this fire, which is hissing nicely after I stuffed in more of yesterday’s cardboard box.

My grandfather was a determined walker, and he sang Purcell songs rather breathlessly while he walked—“I’ll Sail upon the Dog-star” and “I Attempt from Love’s Sickness to Fly-hi-hi-high in Vain.” Later he grew vague and didn’t sing anymore, and he began advocating compulsory world disarmament and walking up to smokers in restaurants saying, “Do you enjoy killing yourself?” He continued to practice the piano, however—he played a certain Chopin E-minor prelude over and over in the basement. When my grandmother broke her back and was in bed wondering whether to call the ambulance, my grandfather retreated downstairs to perform Chopin’s E-minor prelude several times. As the rest of his mind closed up shop, the musical node carried on.

Once when I was fourteen I arrived at my grandparents’ house after twelve hours on a bus. We sat down to dinner. I politely asked my grandfather how his medical work was coming along. “I’m considering whether I should embark on a new research program,” he said. “It seems to me that an effective cure for the facial lesions of adolescence would be a contribution to
humanity. I notice for instance that you have a number of acne pustules there on your forehead, and on your nose, and I wonder whether you think this disease might yield a fruitful program of research.” I said, “Well, yes.” Then came the dear, nervous laugh from my grandmother.

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.