The One-Eyed Man Page 6

  “About thirty-three million,” the reporter said. “‘Approximately thirty-three million Americans struggle to put food on the table’ is the exact quote, here.”

  “What’s the source?” I asked.

  “The USDA,” the reporter said. “Via NPR. Seems reputable enough.”

  “Okay,” I said, and hammer-fisted myself in the face, hard enough to feel it through the Dilaudid.

  “Whoa,” the cameraman said. “Whoa, whoa.”

  “Did you get that?” the reporter asked. “Tell me you got that.”

  “I got it,” the cameraman said. “Weirdest fucking thing I ever shot, man, but I got it.”

  “You’re bleeding,” the reporter said, pointing to my nose.

  “I’m getting used to it,” I said, dabbing at my upper lip with one finger. “It’s been happening a lot lately.”

  For what might have been the first time in his nascent career, the reporter then asked a question he seemed to genuinely want to know the answer to. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because,” I said, “complaining about strawberries being too tart while other people starve is about the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. I deserve to be punched, for saying something like that. But I wouldn’t want to ask anyone else to do it for me.”

  “Okay,” the reporter said.

  The cameraman laughed behind his hand.

  “Are you in the habit of punching yourself in the face?” the reporter asked. “Is that how you got the bruise over your eye?”

  “No,” I told him. “That was some guy on the side of the interstate.”

  The reporter stared at me for a moment, then turned in his seat toward the cameraman. “Bobby,” he said, “how much room does that thing have left on its memory card?”

  • • •

  “So you’ve come completely unhinged, then,” Claire said from the doorway of my hospital room two mornings later.

  “How do you know I wasn’t unhinged before?” I asked.

  She came around the foot of the bed, beautiful extraterrestrial eyes shining with good cheer. Her hair was down now, brighter red in the sunlight from the windows and curled slightly at the ends. “Oh, you obviously were,” she said. “You freaked out about a bottle of soap, basically made an illegal arrest of some hillbilly, got into a semantic argument with a Big Buy clerk, and managed to get yourself shot, all in less than thirty-six hours.”

  “I take it you saw the Newschannel piece,” I said.

  “Also, you’re a recent widower,” Claire said. “Which, along with everything else, is pretty sexy.”

  “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I’m joking,” Claire said. “Being facetious. You know, facetious?”

  “I know the concept. I also used to be able to detect it in conversation. Lately, not so much.”

  Claire sat on the edge of my bed, and as before I caught a sour whiff of last night’s alcohol under the spice of some perfume. This close I could see her eyes, though cheerful, were shot through with angry red capillaries. “So you watched the piece, too?” she asked. “You big narcissist.”

  “All I do here is watch TV,” I told her.

  “It’s getting a lot of attention, you know. Your little breakdown. They’ve interviewed me. The guy with the pickup truck who socked you. The Big Buy girl. Of course the girl from the coffee shop.”

  “I saw all that. Like I said, all I do here is watch TV.”

  “I’m flattered,” Claire said, “to be in such exalted company.”

  “That’s a joke?”

  “Very good.”

  “But you did the interview,” I said.

  “Sure I did. And not just with Newschannel 9. I’m as big an attention whore as the next girl. Phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

  “Mine too,” I said.

  “They still haven’t found the guy who held up the coffee shop, by the way.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Does that worry you?”

  “Should it?”

  “Maybe he’ll try to find you so you can’t identify him in court.”

  “I’m not sure this is the kind of criminal who hunts down and silences witnesses. He didn’t seem that well organized.”

  The molded plastic phone on the nightstand purred for the eighth or ninth time that day. I picked up the handset. On the other end a man with a very low voice and syrupy diction said he wanted to put me on television. I told him I’d already been on television recently, and anyway I couldn’t talk about it now, and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Claire asked.

  “Somebody named Theodore. He wants to give me a television show.”

  “Like a reality show?”

  “I’m not sure. We didn’t get that far. He wants to have lunch.”

  “You should say yes,” Claire said.

  “I know literally nothing about what he’s proposing,” I said.

  “K.,” she said, “do you realize how many people take pictures and videos of their lunch and their cats and their colostomy bags and put it online? It used to be just serial killers who needed that kind of attention. Now it’s all of us.”

  “What does that have to do with whether or not I want to be on TV?”

  “I’m just saying, these days even the most unremarkable life can be validated if enough people see a recording of it.”

  “Okay.”

  “The converse is true, as well,” Claire said.

  “And what’s the converse?”

  “That no matter how remarkable your life, it means nothing if it happens in private.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that.”

  She smirked. “Whether you agree has no bearing on whether it’s true.”

  I decided to change the subject. “So how are things over at Total Foods?”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Claire said. “I got fired.”

  “What? Why?”

  “For speaking truth to power. About soap.”

  “Someone heard us?” I asked.

  “You remember the old joke about why you should never tell secrets on a farm?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Because the corn has ears, the potatoes have eyes, and the beanstalk.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t get it,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “The same can be said of Total Foods. And you don’t have to be in the produce section for the corn to hear you.”

  “I’m sorry you got fired,” I said.

  “Well please, don’t go punching yourself in the face over it or anything.”

  “Hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “In any event, that’s part of why I came. I figured since I’ve suddenly got a lot of time on my hands, and you clearly need someone to look after you, I’d pop by.”

  “I strike you as someone in need of help?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  Claire gathered her hair into a ponytail and secured it with an elastic from her wrist, talking while her hands performed impressive contortions seemingly of their own volition. “I don’t know,” she said. “Live-in nanny. Business adviser. Human shield. Haven’t really thought it through, just yet.”

  “Maybe I should help you get your job back.”

  “In this economy? Please. It was filled five minutes after I walked out. There are thousands of people in this town who would kill to stock overpriced cheese for ten dollars an hour.”

  “Still. Maybe I could talk to your boss. I seem to have new cachet, as a hero.”

  “He’s not my boss anymore,” Claire said. She smiled brightly and poked my good shoulder with one finger. “You are.”

  6

  BETTER THAN FINE

  Aside from the uncomfortable love seat and the sense that he expected a forthrightness that he himself did not traffic in, I also stopped seeing the foul-mouthed therapist because of an Albert Einstein biography.

  As far as revelations go, the book arriv
ed innocuously enough: wrapped in plain brown paper like pornography, with no return address. The note inside indicated that it was a bereavement gift from an old college friend, now a physicist at Stanford. Bobbing in the wake of Sarah’s death, I had no particular interest in Einstein, or really anything other than drinking brown liquor and staring blankly at whatever happened into my field of vision, but I took the book to my back porch, along with a bottle of bourbon and a rocks glass from a set Sarah had purchased years ago for our first dinner party as newlyweds.

  It was a clear dry afternoon in July. I sat in the creaky Adirondack chair whose now-redundant twin rested in the dark of the basement. I poured some whiskey and looked out over the contents of our small backyard: the wildly tentacled rosebush, the fecund oval of mulch under the magnolia, the rainbow of pistils and petals in the flower bed that ran the length of the brick foundation, everything bursting and bright and violently alive.

  I sat considering all this unruly optimism that had screamed out of the ground with neither help nor encouragement from me: Sarah’s legacy, staunchly perennial though she herself was no longer so. The first sip of whiskey stung my lips. After a few minutes I looked down and reread the note from my old college friend, saying he’d heard about Sarah, and was sorry, and further that he regretted we hadn’t seen one another in so long.

  I set the letter aside and picked up the book. I turned it over in my hands, read the synopsis on the back, looked at the black-and-white photo of the author, cracked the spine.

  Einstein lived a long and eventful life, but I am a fast reader, and the bottle of bourbon had only just been opened.

  Toward the end of the book, Einstein’s colleague Besso, who was perhaps closer to him than any other person in his life, died. Einstein, ever decent, penned a letter of condolence to Besso’s widow. He wrote: “In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That means nothing. For physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”

  I read this passage half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen times. The sky blushed, then darkened, and with the sun’s exit the air grew still and the branches of the magnolia ceased whispering. Soon the only sounds came from my roiling guts and the mosquitoes that alighted on my forearms to take their fill. I was stricken, elated, as confused as I’d ever been. When twilight finally blinked out, rendering the words on the page illegible, I looked up as if snapping to sudden consciousness, then switched on the porch light and read the passage some more.

  What could Einstein have known that eliminated all grief over the death of his best friend? Was such revelation even possible? Or was this simply a bit of hyperbole Einstein wielded to leaven a widow’s anguish?

  That means nothing.

  I knew very little about relativity, and I had never in my life needed so badly to understand something. I took the porch stairs two at a time and called my old college friend, using the number he’d provided in the note.

  “Oh, I think Einstein was sincere,” he told me, his voice hoarse with sleep. “He found comfort in what he’d proven. You can’t dedicate that much time and brain space to a problem, solve it so unassailably, and not take to heart its implications.”

  “And so its implications, in this case, being that no one really dies?”

  “Christ, K., what time is it?”

  “One in the morning. Eastern Daylight.”

  “And you’ve had how much to drink, exactly?”

  “I just really need to know about this,” I told him.

  My old college friend sighed. “I mean it’s all theory, K.,” he said. “In both the scientific and practical senses. So that’s the huge caveat. There may come a day when we figure out how to apprehend time accurately with our hearts as well as our heads. But for now, we’re stuck with the illusory. That car has two hundred thousand miles on it. That bologna has gone bad. That person is dead.”

  “Right,” I said. “But the word ‘illusory.’”

  “I mean, I see where you’re going with this,” he said.

  “I’m just trying to understand what it means.”

  “You should sober up,” he said. “Get some sleep. This might not seem so seismic in the light of day.”

  “It’s absolutely not possible,” I told him, “for me to sleep right now.”

  He coughed, and I could hear him rub at his face on the other end of the line. “Is there someone I should call, K.?” he asked. “Someone who can come and be with you for a while?”

  “I don’t need company,” I said. “I need to understand.”

  Another sigh. “Alright,” he said. “Well if you really want to understand the persistence of grief, you need to dig down into Newton.”

  What I came to learn, reading through the rest of the night and into daybreak, was that Isaac Newton is the enemy of the bereaved—that in fact he could be held responsible for (to borrow my friend’s words) the persistence of grief, if not the original concept. Time, to Newton, was absolute: it flowed linearly, and therefore when the present became the past it remained so forever. Once you chose a sweet roll for breakfast, that moment faded out of existence for the rest of eternity. And so it was with all things, up to and including death. But then Einstein proved beyond a doubt that Newton had been wrong, that in fact time is relative, malleable, altered by all manner of things, gravity and perception chief among them. It can be—and is—warped, bent, folded, reversed, sped up, or knotted like a shoelace.

  What wonderful, startling news: Besso lived! But how, exactly, had this been news to me? I was a grown man, educated to an extent that in most of the world would have been considered obscene, yet the most important implications of relativity, proven a century before, were so obscure to me that one might have suspected the gears of a conspiracy had been churning to keep it that way. My head swam with questions. Why did we persist in teaching our children that gravity is a force? Why did we still consider the moments of our lives as comparatively inconsequential parts of a whole, rather than discrete, immutable universes unto themselves? Most important by far: why did we continue to grieve as though no one had corrected Newton’s error? Why were there no flyers in funeral homes and oncology wards declaring on their covers, in bold caps: NO ONE REALLY DIES? Why so much noodling about death on daytime talk shows, but no discussion of its illusory nature? We still answered the phone and collapsed on the floor at grim words from the other end. We still threw ourselves, wailing, onto caskets, still shrieked and tore at our clothes, still sat alone in quiet houses drinking too much and staring at the walls.

  But now, the more I read, the more I understood that Einstein’s sanguinity at the death of Besso had been genuine. I realized how ridiculous it was to feel abandoned, or bereft, or alone. I switched from bourbon to coffee, smiling as water burbled through the percolator. My wife might have been absent, but she was not dead to me, any more than Besso had been to Einstein. And if she was not dead, then I could not be responsible for her death.

  I stood at the kitchen window, mug in hand, as the sun began to crest the roof of the apartment building next door, sending spears of light through my corneas. My pupils contracted painfully, and I recoiled, returning to myself like a soul being yanked back into a body.

  And I resolved, then and there, to no longer take part in the false propagation of mourning, and to never again trust, uncorroborated, the evidence of my senses.

  But for now, first things first—since Sarah was not dead, was not a memory, then I had no obligation to keep her memory alive, to preserve the shrine of our house, to leave her things undisturbed as totems of my grief. The coffee, fresh and black, went down like molten steel. I gulped it, relishing the burn, then ran upstairs to the bedroom and began gathering things and placing them in a pile on the area rug next to the bed. I stripped great armfuls of Sarah’s clothes from the racks in the closet and dropped them, complete with hangers, to the floor. Down went her jewelry boxes, various knickknacks, boots and shoes, a co
llection of matchbooks from places we’d vacationed. Down went mementos and decorative objects, framed photographs, a broken pocket watch that had been on Guadalcanal with her grandfather, a Victorian brooch that had belonged to her great-grandmother. When I’d finished clearing the bedroom of things that no longer served any purpose other than to inspire grim nostalgia, I spread Sarah’s favorite childhood blanket on the floor, gathered everything into it, folded the edges over, and carried it downstairs and out the door into the front yard, where dew simmered on the grass and air conditioners had already taken up an electric chorus against the day’s gathering heat.

  I ran back inside, poured and slurped another scalding mug of coffee, then set about clearing Sarah’s things from the ground floor, where I was faced with more of the same: countless photographs, small ceramic figurines, a collection of jade elephants, glassware and silverware and china I had no use for, an entire cabinet of spices that ditto, a juicer and vegetable steamer and garlic press, decorative throw blankets, a rogue pair of Sarah’s slippers that had made their way under the sofa during her illness. It’s probably more expedient, now that I think about it, to mention what I kept rather than what I culled: one plate, one bowl, one glass, one fork, one knife, one spoon. One spatula, and one nonstick skillet. One medium saucepan. The salt and pepper shakers, the percolator and coffee grinder. A tiny flower Sarah had picked from the grass in Cape Cod and pressed into a book—spared only because I’d forgotten it was there. Half a gallon of 2 percent milk, most of a jar of peanut butter, an unopened bottle of hoisin sauce. A set of ceramic owl cookie jars, retained because I still used them to store cookies. Most of the furniture, except the Canadian rocker that only Sarah ever sat in, which I wrestled through three doorways and out onto the lawn.

  By the time I’d finished, the ratio of belongings under the willow tree to inside the house was approximately three to one. I stood facing a miniature landfill, ten feet in diameter at its base, taller than me by an inch or two at its summit.