He Hasn't Been to the Bank in Weeks
When Helen was dying, I am afraid, I couldn’t relate to the world just there, just right there. Looking out the window of her room I couldn’t see through it without trying. I thought first of a scene in a horrible movie I’d acted in as a young man. It was in a post everything world and I knew it was bad when I’d made it.
* * * * *
He had smashed most of the glass in the building already.
He walked quietly toward the remaining half wall that looked out into the reception area. The band had been loud. Where was it now? The sledge hammer swung loosely at his side. He knocked it into a clay pot holding a large palm-like plant and watched it crack.
Laughing, he held the handle in both hands and swung hard, breaking the pot and sending bits of organic material shaking to the carpet. He breathed deeply and listened to the silence. The earth in the pot clung to the plant’s roots and he thought he loved that smell. Silence and the smell of the earth. The glass wall that awaited him was as smooth as a lake, and he saw his reflection there.
Blood was smeared on his shirt in wet paw prints. He looked at his paws and they were cut. They bled.
* * * * *
The sun shone on the gluey parking lot, and I had some minutes to watch its pretty standard illumination from her third-floor room before the nurse came in and saw me turn, dry-eyed, back toward Helen, and clear my throat.
“I was afraid,” I said, but those were not the words I meant to say.
She nodded and pressed the call button.
“She was a mammal,” I told her.
“But a human in his normal erect state cannot thrive,” the nurse said and she touched my living body on its shoulder.
“I will, you see, because of the father.”
“Your Fate can be a great big help. You’re Norse, but this is mechanical.”
As if the regression in her language could be a clue, I spied a jar of leeches on the cart. Too late; they were dead.
“You should have punched air holes,” I said, and she said she didn’t know what I meant.
I took a big gulp and looked back to the parking lot. My car had a ring of melting snow piled around it. The night comes so early in the winter and snow and the asphalt and the bare trees and the blue stick of the electrical outlets and the glass in the attendant’s booth, they were all turning blue and I know I couldn’t but I felt like I could extend my own blue-shirted arm out the clean glass of the window and smudge the blue ring of snow out, and rescue my car without breaking anything—not the glass or the tiny car three stories below or even my thin, blue-veined arm or my delicate, effeminate, elegant fingers.
I took out my pen and clicked it, but the nurse got to the clipboard first.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know what to put. I haven’t been to the bank in weeks.”
And I was hungry, suddenly. I tried to enjoy the feeling, I wanted to get lean, lie down and do sit ups, look at the nurse and raise my arms like I’d just won a race and was, of course, younger. We were all younger.
* * * * *
I kneaded her shoulders and held her arms and rubbed them. I held her face in my hands and wanted to kiss those funny coloured lips. I couldn’t see the fine hair on her upper lip and was afraid they’d shaved her.
I was shocked at the ridiculous nature of my desire. I held my dead wife’s best panties in my hands and slid them up her legs. They were lace. I pulled them up and snugged them tight against her.
I meant to say sorry.
It was the opposite of taking them off and I meant to say sorry. The wild unpatterned curls of pubic hair curled out of the elastic leg holes and the grey ones stuck straight out.
The body. The body, she was a mammal, as I had stupidly told my daughter on the phone after making the same mistake with the nurse and I was so glad I dressed Helen alone.
I was as hard as when I was a boy and I felt my face burn with shame.
“It’s just my body,” I said, and I smoothed the skin of her cheeks because I thought she might smile, but no, she would not.
It is the time ghost. We understand it now. We make copies of all our legitimate responses to the material world, we see the copies we make the copies from on huge movie screens, loud as hell, or alone with the tiny buds in our ears and the personal screen inches from our face. We have lines to say and whatever we say we know it is the approved expression from a genre we despise and yet, we do feel, we do.
I was alone with my dead wife and shamed, but I dressed her perfectly in her dark skirt and silk blouse the colour of pearls. I had to, after taking a moment away, and looking at the stainless steel cart that held, I guess, instruments and towels and swabs and so on when it was not in the morgue, ask my daughter in from the hallway outside to tell me if I had done a good enough job and she said yes.
My daughter was so lost. She was doing things correctly and I couldn’t think of Helen, myself, directly, because I didn’t know what to do.
“Not lost,” I heard my daughter say, as she spoke to the mortician and then left him, to drive me home. The sudden heat of the summer outside was also lucid moment and I felt there was something kind about its thump. It was thick and a small family walked in the sunshine across the street, a boy in a big hat almost lost behind them in the shade of a tree.
My son-in-law was in the car. My daughter opened the passenger door for me and I got in. When she was in the back seat we started to drive and I told them, “Thank goodness, both of you,” and I knew by his glance in the mirror I was still talking gibberish.
“Are you sure you want to speak?” my daughter asked me, and I was sure, though I didn’t know what I would say. Even when it’s me in the third person, I feel small. Just because I made jokes doesn’t mean I didn’t believe.
* * * * *
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“No, that’s true. It’s not.”
“There are bigger things. This is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Okay.”
“It isn’t.”
“Okay. That’s true—it’s not nothing.”
“It’s something I care about,” he said.
“But in the great scheme—”
“In the great scheme nothing. Don’t tell me about the great scheme.”
She chewed on a fry, then passed him the ketchup. She finished chewing then pointed the next fry at him, widening her eyes and saying quietly: “Do you deny the existence of The Great Scheme?”
He laughed and said no, no of course not.
“Well?”
“Okay, I get it. Compared to death, compared to pain, torture, so on. I get it.”
“This is nothing, right?”
“No, I guess not.”
“But you should have started with something else and worked your way up to death.”
“What?”
“You said it’s nothing compared to death, but you went on, when really you could have stopped there.”
“I wanted some volume of things.”
“Volume?”
“A list, yes. Maybe a big list.”
“Fine, then start with something smaller—”
“Hunger,” he said.
“Good one.”
“It is.”
“Then go from there,” she said. “Hunger. Fine. Hunger, then go on to say a broken heart or—”
“Oh Jesus. Here we go.”
* * * * *
He had smashed most of the glass in the building already.
He walked quietly toward the remaining half wall that looked out into the reception area. The band had been loud. Where was it now? The sledge hammer swung loosely at his side. He knocked it into a clay pot holding a large palm-like plant and watched it crack.
Laughing, he held the handle in both hands and swung hard, breaking the pot and sending bits of organic material shaking to the carpet. He breathed deeply and listened to the silence. The earth in the pot clung to the plant’s roots and he thought he loved that smell. Silence and the smell of the earth. The glass wall that awaited him was as smooth as a lake, and he saw his reflection there.
Blood was smeared on his shirt in wet paw prints. He looked at his paws and they were cut. They bled.
* * * * *
The sun shone on the gluey parking lot, and I had some minutes to watch its pretty standard illumination from her third-floor room before the nurse came in and saw me turn, dry-eyed, back toward Helen, and clear my throat.
“I was afraid,” I said, but those were not the words I meant to say.
She nodded and pressed the call button.
“She was a mammal,” I told her.
“But a human in his normal erect state cannot thrive,” the nurse said and she touched my living body on its shoulder.
“I will, you see, because of the father.”
“Your Fate can be a great big help. You’re Norse, but this is mechanical.”
As if the regression in her language could be a clue, I spied a jar of leeches on the cart. Too late; they were dead.
“You should have punched air holes,” I said, and she said she didn’t know what I meant.
I took a big gulp and looked back to the parking lot. My car had a ring of melting snow piled around it. The night comes so early in the winter and snow and the asphalt and the bare trees and the blue stick of the electrical outlets and the glass in the attendant’s booth, they were all turning blue and I know I couldn’t but I felt like I could extend my own blue-shirted arm out the clean glass of the window and smudge the blue ring of snow out, and rescue my car without breaking anything—not the glass or the tiny car three stories below or even my thin, blue-veined arm or my delicate, effeminate, elegant fingers.
I took out my pen and clicked it, but the nurse got to the clipboard first.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know what to put. I haven’t been to the bank in weeks.”
And I was hungry, suddenly. I tried to enjoy the feeling, I wanted to get lean, lie down and do sit ups, look at the nurse and raise my arms like I’d just won a race and was, of course, younger. We were all younger.
* * * * *
I kneaded her shoulders and held her arms and rubbed them. I held her face in my hands and wanted to kiss those funny coloured lips. I couldn’t see the fine hair on her upper lip and was afraid they’d shaved her.
I was shocked at the ridiculous nature of my desire. I held my dead wife’s best panties in my hands and slid them up her legs. They were lace. I pulled them up and snugged them tight against her.
I meant to say sorry.
It was the opposite of taking them off and I meant to say sorry. The wild unpatterned curls of pubic hair curled out of the elastic leg holes and the grey ones stuck straight out.
The body. The body, she was a mammal, as I had stupidly told my daughter on the phone after making the same mistake with the nurse and I was so glad I dressed Helen alone.
I was as hard as when I was a boy and I felt my face burn with shame.
“It’s just my body,” I said, and I smoothed the skin of her cheeks because I thought she might smile, but no, she would not.
It is the time ghost. We understand it now. We make copies of all our legitimate responses to the material world, we see the copies we make the copies from on huge movie screens, loud as hell, or alone with the tiny buds in our ears and the personal screen inches from our face. We have lines to say and whatever we say we know it is the approved expression from a genre we despise and yet, we do feel, we do.
I was alone with my dead wife and shamed, but I dressed her perfectly in her dark skirt and silk blouse the colour of pearls. I had to, after taking a moment away, and looking at the stainless steel cart that held, I guess, instruments and towels and swabs and so on when it was not in the morgue, ask my daughter in from the hallway outside to tell me if I had done a good enough job and she said yes.
My daughter was so lost. She was doing things correctly and I couldn’t think of Helen, myself, directly, because I didn’t know what to do.
“Not lost,” I heard my daughter say, as she spoke to the mortician and then left him, to drive me home. The sudden heat of the summer outside was also lucid moment and I felt there was something kind about its thump. It was thick and a small family walked in the sunshine across the street, a boy in a big hat almost lost behind them in the shade of a tree.
My son-in-law was in the car. My daughter opened the passenger door for me and I got in. When she was in the back seat we started to drive and I told them, “Thank goodness, both of you,” and I knew by his glance in the mirror I was still talking gibberish.
“Are you sure you want to speak?” my daughter asked me, and I was sure, though I didn’t know what I would say. Even when it’s me in the third person, I feel small. Just because I made jokes doesn’t mean I didn’t believe.
* * * * *
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“No, that’s true. It’s not.”
“There are bigger things. This is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Okay.”
“It isn’t.”
“Okay. That’s true—it’s not nothing.”
“It’s something I care about,” he said.
“But in the great scheme—”
“In the great scheme nothing. Don’t tell me about the great scheme.”
She chewed on a fry, then passed him the ketchup. She finished chewing then pointed the next fry at him, widening her eyes and saying quietly: “Do you deny the existence of The Great Scheme?”
He laughed and said no, no of course not.
“Well?”
“Okay, I get it. Compared to death, compared to pain, torture, so on. I get it.”
“This is nothing, right?”
“No, I guess not.”
“But you should have started with something else and worked your way up to death.”
“What?”
“You said it’s nothing compared to death, but you went on, when really you could have stopped there.”
“I wanted some volume of things.”
“Volume?”
“A list, yes. Maybe a big list.”
“Fine, then start with something smaller—”
“Hunger,” he said.
“Good one.”
“It is.”
“Then go from there,” she said. “Hunger. Fine. Hunger, then go on to say a broken heart or—”
“Oh Jesus. Here we go.”
