22

I fell into a field, clods and furrows. An armored beast, many-legged and encased in a segmented shell, tumbled onto my thumb as my fingers dug into the earth. It worried at the knuckle before it, uncuriously wondering if it should continue its march.

Thoughtless, it was living enough to roll into a ball as I nudged it gently with my other hand. I pulled myself to my feet, one foot dragging. I flailed my way ahead, hating my body, a stunt-clown, corporeal joke.

At the last moment I tripped on a hoop of wire on the lawn. I tumbled, and rolled onto my back. I would get up soon. Very soon. As soon as I could move again.

A face. It was the face of a referee, peering down, inquisitive, urgent, even a little annoyed.

“Richard—where did you go?”

I tried to tell him to get me out of the sunlight, and all I could do was hang on to him, dragging at his bathrobe, that luxurious robe, a gift, I was sure, from Susan. Susan, who must have admired these pajamas. Oh, wear the nice shiny blue ones, Samuel. Or perhaps the pajamas, too, were a gift. I had slept through a Christmas, and a New Year’s Day. And who knows what wars and what discoveries, strikes, political pronouncements, distant coups, civil wars.

“Richard, where were you?”

“Help me,” I heard myself croak.

I was desperate in my idiocy, a man rising at life’s banquet needing the Heimlich maneuver, demanding CPR, no one understanding.

So if this is how I die again, I thought, I will have this absurd last moment, one foot stuck though the loop of a croquet game, and the other digging spasmodically, excavating a divot.

Until I climbed to my feet again. With Dr. Opal kneeling on the lawn calling after me, I ran toward the house, hard, straight for the wall, the solid stone and mortar. But I knew where I was going. I saw the pane of glass behind the pruned stalks of poinsettia.

I dived through a window. I scrambled down inside the cellar, into the odor of damp and mildew aged to a kind of soil. The hot water heater, the shiny Sherman tank of the furnace, all of it in darkness. I tore at the old asphalt tiles, pea green floor covering, the ancient tar brittle, the flooring peeling away.

I dug with my hands, a diver desperate for air. But I was not climbing upward. What I wanted was not oxygen.

It was this hiding place, among the roots of the foundation, among the gravel and the dirt, and deeper, as far as I could go.