The End

When I want to be listened to, I knock something onto the floor. They put us three to a room, three beds, and I'm furthest in, near the window, though there's only fifty yards of field outside, tall grasses the mowers never cut, and then the woods. Philip, on the other end near the door, sleeps so far from waking I wonder if it's a new kind of death. They always come up with new ones. I've knocked so many things onto the floor, they've put everything out of reach. Considered throwing myself onto the floor, but I'd probably break into pieces like a windowpane. I don't have the strength to do it, anyway. Being near the window is a curse. Drew is in the middle bed, and he sleepwalks, doesn't mean to, gets embarrassed by it every time, but he's smart when he's unconscious: somehow he always knows which direction to walk to go out the door. He doesn't talk much. I learned in the war, and again after the war, that men can't really talk to one another unless they've had the same experiences.

Every spring the day before the baseball season started, my mother would put on her coat, walk to Derry's store a block down and three blocks over, and come back with a new unlined notebook, spiral-bound, and a pencil she'd bought and asked to have sharpened. Derry would do that only for friends, he was a very stingy man. The same notebook would be used all season as she listened to baseball on the radio in the evenings and wrote down the plays, dots and lines and boxes and shaded triangles in a code only she could understand. I'd like to be folded into a notebook and used in that way, marked on my skin in a strange tongue, prized. She didn't talk as she did it, just made the lines and shapes and filled them in.

Marissa talked about everything, mostly things she didn't know or hadn't seen, but it wasn't her fault. I don't think of my wife all that much in here. At first I felt guilty about it, but the pull of the past, the early past, is so strong with me, I forget my guilt, and then forget my wife. Estella was this girl I played with in the neighborhood growing up. I couldn't have been more than five or six when I stole a kiss from her. She cried and cried but I'm sure she was fine, grew up, married, had kids, a full life and never thought twice about me. I never thought about her until I ended up here.

I think about the games that we played, kids' games, made up from bits of rocks and sticks and whatever was at hand. Marbles, glassies of course. Jacks. Estella threw sand in my face once. I stumbled home in tears. Little kids make you cry. My sons doesn't visit me, but most of the time I forget about them too. I think about Mark, who lived across from us in the cheap apartments stacked with GIs after the war. He wasn't a soldier but he was married, and we would show up at each other's door hangdog, having angered our young wives who had expected so much more from us, from being married, and because there was no place to go, we'd walk through the streets to the fields on the edge of town and back, never saying much, but understanding one another. Mark was younger than me and that's why he wasn't drafted. My son before I had my sons. I think of Mark now more than I think of my own sons. Everything in my head I think about these days is the thing before something else, before the thing which should be more important, but isn't somehow. Is this old age? My skin is like paper and feels ageless, feels newly processed and blank, waiting.

We moved away and at first Mark and I wrote letters, but there was never much to say, and then it became cards, for holidays with a greeting and maybe two lines about life inside. As our families grew the cards ended, and I think he lives in Indiana somewhere. But who he is now doesn't interest me. Should I feel guilty about that? I should be too old to have regrets. Estella too, may be dead somewhere, but that doesn't matter. My children have busy lives, but they don't matter.

I lie here in this bed and forget my own body, forget my literal matter. I am a restless mind, rehearsing the past as if I were about to get on stage and perform it. Being near the window is a curse. No one ever walks in the tall grass, and no one emerges from the woods. But I go there. I leave this bed like Drew in the middle of the night, but no one knows. I spill myself onto the floor and smash the window and cover for it by knocking down something else, a vase or a picture frame. They keep everything away from me but every few days something, new flowers or a trinket I don't recognize, appears by the bed. So I escape, and the night is cold and I always forget to bring my coat, but I run, crouching low, keeping alert, zigzagging through no man's land until I reach the tall grass. Then I crawl, hands and knees, carefully so I don't crush too much of it and provide them with a clear trail to find me. I get to the first copse, at the edge of the woods, stop and listen. The wind itself doesn't pursue me.

Alone with the birds and frogs, safe under the dim trees, I dance. Haven't danced since I was a very young boy, but I dance. I'm amazed I even have the strength to do it, but I do. The escape and cold night air invigorates me. And I play, a game devised from my own head, with rocks and sticks. When I rest, I spread this good earth on my paper skin, write secret signs with it, and lay down at the foot of an oak. I will die there, and feed acorns for years yet. No words are needed to die, and I have used none. No one listens when I speak, because no one is here, and because I do not speak, but there is understanding. There must be understanding.