CHAPTER SEVEN
JUPITER (THE COMBINER)

Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me know what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.

—Kaye Ballard

The distance between planets is insane, and the darkness out here is mind-boggling. That’s what Space Boy just radioed in. Better off we are, I radio back, on solid ground with blue sky overhead and birds chirping. There’s no turning back, however. This I understand now, but I can’t resist razzing Space Boy a bit. I hear the drive to Pluto, I say, is at least forty astronomical units, ninety-three million miles times forty. You’ll need to excite a lot of dark matter to arrive there in time.

Space Boy doesn’t miss a beat. There’s an optimizer here, he radios back, just to my right that runs calculations nonstop on how much, when, and where (there’s no better word for it) to tickle dark matter. That’s Space Boy’s metaphor for manipulating flux gravitons. Tickling dark matter—what an idea. Who would have guessed? So much for dilithium crystals and tylium ore, I radio back. Luckily, there’s a lot of dark matter out here, he says. The kind of atomic matter we grow up with, dirt, water, rocks, and toothpaste, comprises only 4.9 percent of the universe. Dark matter, on the other hand, 26.8 percent. Beyond that—the missing 68.3 percent—is anyone’s guess. What a universe! I radio back, truly amazed. She’s out here somewhere, Space Boy says with zest.

It’s not easy to be in two places at once, but that’s what woe is all about, hauling one’s aching body around the cosmos while chopping onions. Says Space Boy: I still haven’t got the hang of the dark-matter tickler—it’s really fussy—but things are far from hopeless out here.

Friends are concerned I’m getting skinny. Commiseration. They’ll furrow their brow, make sympathetic sounds, and ask about my weight. M. said, You’ve lost a lot of weight, haven’t you? She’s worried I’m dwindling. No, I said, I’ve actually put a few pounds on. Yes, I’ve gained weight—I’m not fat—only four pounds but enough to dispel any illusion of weight loss. You might think I’m falling down on the job of grieving, but no, that’s not the case. I can weep and be chubby at the same time. Oddly enough, it was M. who didn’t look well. She seemed quite shaky, as a matter of fact. Her whole body was atremble. Not good, I’m sure, but what do I know? Meanwhile, I had a warm bag of french fries in my hands, which I was dying to eat, but had to stifle my teenage desire, especially now that you are not here to do that for me.

The burning bush out front is turning. I count twelve red leaves. In another week or so it will explode into a ball of fire. If I hear a voice, however, I’ll turn and run the other way, unless that voice is yours. Then I’ll stay and brave the weird metaphysics. Half the sumac on Brown Street has gone orange, and a tribe of towering maples on Davenport has begun its flaming out. The chloroplasts are retreating, exposing the carotenoids in leaf cells, the yellow, orange, and brown pigments. Chemically speaking. Soon after reaching peak color every leaf in town will cascade to the ground in a poetic flutter. There, they’ll shrivel up desiccated, which is the way of all things. The color green will have vanished, and with it yellow, brown, red, and purple. The black walnut trees are the first to go, the oaks the last. And in over half the world, nature will seem dead and wolves will howl.

I’ve begun harvesting all the colors (soon to be lost) in my optic memory. The showy white and violet of the gaudy hibiscus, the heart-shaped purple and pink of morning glories—to shore myself up against the dark and achromatic world of winter. Alone in a discolored universe.

I’m looking at a photo I took of you in southern France. It’s 2011 and we are at the Abbey of Gellone in the village of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. I’m on a teaching gig. An eleventh-century Benedictine church with cloister and garden, the abbey had the curious fate, you tell me, of being abandoned and sold off piece by piece to various museums, including the Cloisters in New York City. Medieval columns and pilasters are scattered across Europe and America, you say.

You are sitting in the restored cloister resting against a square column. Midday Mediterranean sunshine falls on your back, its light reflecting from a nearby column on your face. You seem aglow. You are wearing a navy-blue net sweater over your black top. Your hair is cut stylishly and blends in with the medieval limestone. I’m struck by the look of serenity on your face. Your lips are slightly parted in an evocative way—you seldom allow yourself to be caught off guard in a photo—but right now you seem unaware of the camera. Ordinarily, you strike a sporty pose in travel photos, smart and energetic—poised for the folks back home. But here you seem to have given yourself over to the abbey, as if it had called to you and you had answered. What did it say to you?

I shouldn’t read so much into a photo, but how can I resist? These images are all that remains of you. How long before my memories flutter away. Back then, time was on our side, a quarter of a century yet on the clock. But here I am now looking at your face, fixed in a single moment, your swirling hair caught in midair as you turn your head toward the camera, and I am futureless. I can’t type the word without feeling empty. It no longer exists. How many other words are gone? As I write, our eyes lock—your shy blue eyes. The square limestone column leans your way. I think the abbey has fallen under a spell. In the photo you’re about to speak, a word that was said following the click of the shutter but now lost. We are always losing things, socks, hair, sight, hearing, dreams, lovers. In this photo you will always be about to speak, just as your hair is about to fall back into place.

Today I bought a pumpkin for four bucks and hoped to buy an orange potted mum for the porch, but the mum was expensive. I’m not paying thirty dollars for a three-letter plant! You never seemed fond of mums. They were too gaudy. As you know, I have a soft spot for kitsch—my teenage desire. Speaking of which, I also bought stamps at the post office this afternoon, not the Madonna and Child series or Advances in Aviation but Star Trek stamps. There’s a stamp with the Vulcan hand salute, one with the transporter, another with the Starfleet insignia. By the way, my mom said she saw another object out her window the other night hovering over the neighbor’s backyard. Her sightings began just before Milo died. Like you, she sensed something. The Cassandra syndrome.

It was cold and bleak today, a peek at what’s to come. Doomsday sky and cool damp air with gusty winds. Like a switch, the low front set off a wave of change in the arboreal world. Elm trees that were indecisively green yesterday are paranoid yellow today, as if they had seen a ghost.

I have a bad headache, you say. Suddenly it’s Sunday in October and you are curled up in a fetal position. What’s wrong? I say. You don’t speak. Your head is throbbing. Any moment you will bolt for the bathroom to vomit. I lie down beside you and stroke your back like a pet. Can I get you anything? You don’t speak. It’s a bad one. Second migraine this month. Have you taken any Tylenol? I ask. You shake your head. I’ll bring a Tylenol and some ginger ale, I say. The room is dark but I can see your eyes watering. Your forehead is creased. The first migraine was in graduate school, you say. Then it became chronic. It followed you here to Washington. You’re in agony, three days rolled up in a ball. It scares me to see you paralyzed like this.

Your migraines seem to come out of nowhere, I say. It’s the change in temperature, you say, drier cooler air, maybe the ragweed. I don’t know. It’s painful to speak. Would an ice pack help? I say. I’m stupid and helpless. You won’t see a doctor. What’s the point? you say. You’re hav ing vertigo. Help me up to the bathroom, you say, white as the sheets. I drag you across the hall and position you in front of the toilet. You gag and heave for ten minutes. I drag you back to bed. Momentarily, you feel better. Thirty-six million people suffer from migraines, you say, and no one knows why. I’ve never had one, I say, feeling guilty. Tension headaches, but nothing as glamorous as a migraine. You don’t know what you’re missing, you say. Migraine auras, though, I’ve experienced these—a fuzzy cloud of blues and greens—but without the head pain. A faint smile.

I rub your shoulders and talk about the time Willy Lahiff dropped a bolder on my head. Luckily, it was mostly caked mud, a clump of dirt and stones, so the blood streaming down my face was from shallow wounds, but my mom almost passed out. Why did Willy Lahiff drop a ball of dirt on your head? you ask. I think I did something bad to Willy. I had it coming. Such a devil, you say. Afraid so, I say. Do you have any appetite? Maybe tomato soup and crackers? Your head is spinning again so no tomato soup and crackers. Shortly after our move to Iowa, the migraines stopped for a while but then returned.

Do you remember our first date? We are in Georgetown on Wisconsin Avenue near M Street seated at a table for two. Tonight it’s crowded, but there’s one seating in the middle of the room. I am wearing a herringbone jacket. You, in a long skirt, a solid crop blazer, and a dazzling silk scarf. Because this is a date, you are wearing lipstick. We’re both dressed like grad students for job interviews—you more smartly, though. Herringbone is not a good look for me, but I won’t know this for some time. Neither of us has the courage to look the other in the eye. That would seem romantic which is not acceptable behavior here. It’s a job interview, after all.

We talk about many things. Bette Davis. George Bush. Janet Jackson. The Berlin Wall is about to come down. NASA launches a space probe to Jupiter. Whatever happened to the moon? you say. Russia has just pulled out of Afghanistan. A week ago, the TASS agency reported that three-eyed aliens landed in the city of Voronezh. Tall tales from the tundra. Walmart is about to open its first store in the Northeast. Walmart, what’s that? In between Gado-gado, Nasi goreng, and lamb and chicken curry, we talk about movies, Batman and Roger and Me. You’re drinking red wine, me beer. The food is great. We love Indonesian, but it’s time to leave. Who pays? We have a mile to walk in the brisk October night to Foggy Bottom.

There’s no moonlight but it’s a good date. We like each other. Do we hold hands? Down M Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, across Rock Creek, around Washington Circle, over to 23rd Street. Descend into the underworld of the Metro. Just eight weeks ago you were in Indiana finishing your PhD. When a woman resides a long time in the vacant Midwest, you say, she feels the desire for a city.

We both live in underground apartments with little natural light, a lot of mildew, and the random rodent—it’s all we can afford—and pretend our digs aren’t expensive cellars. It’s the perfect location for two underdogs. At night, the spotted camel crickets will come out like creatures in a creepy film, leaping six feet in the air and looking nothing like a cricket. But tonight, on this first date, there are no moonbeams or camel crickets, just you and me and the cat. The place is unfurnished so we sit on the floor and talk. All those words. I’m thinking of only one thing as I speak, however, about the first kiss. It’s the end of the evening and I’ve never been good with this. Something tells me you’re no better. It’s a classically awkward moment for normal people, but quadruply so for two young nerds dressed for job interviews. How to get through the last ten minutes without agonizing embarrassment—well, that’s not easy.

My palms are wet and I’m feeling hot. A wave of shyness comes over me—and you too—this is not good. I’m losing the power of speech. I get up to say goodbye. You walk to the door. I love the way you walk, so light on your feet, like a ballerina. I want to say something witty but I can’t even form a sentence. It’s like cerebral palsy. My gait is unsteady, my hand is shaking, I have no respiratory control. Precisely at this moment you bend forward and pucker your lips—and so do I. Maybe this won’t be bad after all, I think. The butterflies flap their wings and I put my hands on your waist for better leverage. Two more inches of dead space to cross between our moistening lips. And then the terrible click, clack of eyeglasses. Our monster frames have collided, in fact have interlocked like a Norfolk latch. You try to pull away but take my face with you. I tug my way but your face follows me. We are fastened together, and we still can’t kiss. My nose is in the way. This is embarrassing. You are blushing, as am I, but neither of us can see this because the two pair of eyeglasses have become one, creating a pattern of optical interference that leaves us both groping in the dark like blind cave crickets. At wits’ end we produce word sounds that have no meaning, excruciating sounds, while making every effort to unlock our eyeglasses. If this were a job interview, I wouldn’t expect a callback.

It was a lovely evening, until the ritual kiss when our giant eyes got in the way. A tiny fiasco but a telling one. Why didn’t we simply remove our glasses? A suspicious couple we were. In your eyes, I seemed rakish (I was). You needed to keep things in clear focus and not be taken in by my devilish ways, and I don’t blame you. And me, I was afraid my large nose would seem even more conspicuous without the glasses. I had a mask on, and I wasn’t about to remove it quite yet.

On Sundays, we began the day at the Kalorama Café in Adams Morgan. This was our dating routine. Start with a hardy breakfast. We took the Metro to Dupont Circle and walked north for a mile to Kalorama Road. We then stood in line for ninety minutes, observing the funky Latino kids skateboard down 18th Street. The black kids were across the street at the Marie Reed Rec Center in four-on-four basketball. It was a long wait for a table but what the hell, we thought. I liked the whole wheat pancakes, you the eggs Benedict. We shared an order of hash browns. Then it was up and over to Idle Time Bookstore near Columbia Road. Browse for an hour and then back to Dupont for more grazing at Kramerbooks. We dawdled, meandered, and joked, two ramblers falling in love, sharing a conspiracy of avoidance. By then it was six p.m. and time for dinner. We’d take the Metro to Clarendon for Vietnamese—remember Nam Viet—where you always ate the lemongrass tofu with mixed vegetables? Me and my bottle of Singha and the sticky rice. I’d grab the City Paper, we’d scan the movies, and then it was off to Georgetown for a film—this was fun. But then came Monday and the oppressive pile of ungraded papers.

A hot summer-like day has thrown many trees into confusion. A steady, stiff wind sends leaves to the ground in bunches. Everywhere, the yellow and orange leaves afloat in the breezy air. I found two six-inch mums at the farmers’ market yesterday and arranged them in our big pots on the porch. It took half an hour to jerry-rig the garden pots—the only way to elevate the mums was with paint buckets—but in the end two lurid yellow mums were stationed on either side of the front door, like fallen stars. The blossoms are so bright I have sun spots on my eyes. They say the blooms on forced mums won’t last long—what does?—but I’m hoping for two weeks.

I returned home from Grinnell along US-6. A number of farmers were still at work on last-minute runs in soybean fields, racing to beat the predicted weekend rain. I drove along the unlit highway under a Hunter’s Moon, larger than most, mesmerized by the swarm of John Deeres on secret missions. Out in the vast darkness of the soybean fields, the combines looked like fleets of invading spaceships, their high-intensity beacons lighting up the dusty fields with weird intent. Alone in the car at night, there’s nothing to keep my imagination in check. On Friday morning the furnace wouldn’t go on, and it was plenty chilly. I finally pruned the flowering quince, by the way, which had overwhelmed the front steps. Took forever to bag the debris. My lower back is moaning.

These are the quotidian facts. Much of our existence is devoted to such unmemorable moments, not that you’re curious to know any of this, but I’m telling you to remind you that between life and death much is forgotten. All of this I now refuse to leave behind, even the most tiresome detail. The secret to sorrow is remaining vigilant. Had I not been so careless, I would have chronicled every blink of your eye.

Our romance wasn’t extraordinary, but there were some funny quirks. Remember our strange coupling ritual? We were about to make our first big purchase as a couple. It was Friday and Twin Peaks was set to debut on Sunday night, but neither of us had a TV. New territory for both. Most first-time shoppers buy a coffee maker or a blender. Besides a bottle of wine, we had never bought anything together. We bought a big-screen TV, and it wasn’t cheap. A thirty-five-inch RCA at Fred Myers in Maryland. We had to take the Beltway and were in the car forever. It took hours to find the TVs, and when we did there were so many. Hundreds of televisions, little ones, big ones, even bigger ones. We felt like third-world immigrants dazed by the opulence of America. Our hands were shaking, we both fumbled for our wallets. Big and heavy, the whopping machine was not your kind of purchase—you who preferred the scale of a bento box.

But this collaborative act wasn’t about aesthetics or about economics. It was about making a pledge to one another in the bizarre language of consumerism neither of us understood but which we spoke with surprising excitement. We knew what this meant. Our English basement apartments weren’t large enough for such a TV. We would have to move in together, somewhere big enough for you, me, and the RCA. How terrifying. You knew you had crossed a line. There was no going back now. An adorable blue-eyed blonde with a laser-sharp mind had just become entangled with a dark-haired hothead who gave the evil eye to unsuspecting colleagues. If you were ambivalent you did a good job of hiding it. But there it was, the RCA, the Log Lady, and the beginning of a life together.

The RCA wound up in my apartment, though I can’t remember why. It was twenty-six years ago. Some of the details escape me. But there it was on my kitchen table when the pilot of Twin Peaks aired, surrounded by granola and coffee bags. That Sunday night we switched on the RCA and sat back on the sofa. We saw the tumbling slow-motion waterfall on the Snoqualmie River during the neon-green opening credit roll. Welcome to Twin Peaks. Population 51,201. A snowcapped mountain rose up in the background. The foghorn is blowing behind the dark sounds of the synthesizer when Pete calls the sheriff after discovering a body bag with Laura Palmer washed up on a riverbank. “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” Poor Laura. We both looked at each other with bright eyes when Sheriff Truman crams a giant bear claw into his mouth, just as Agent Cooper walks in with important updates on the murder. Caught in an awkward moment, the sheriff struggles to chew and swallow the pastry but to no avail. It’s huge. Everyone has a donut in their mouth—Lucy and Andy—which they gobble up with childish abandon. Damn fine donuts. Cooper runs down their upcoming tasks while the sheriff continues to toil with his bear claw, the camera holding on the hard-working jaw of Michael Ontkean for what seemed like hours.

We looked at each other and exchanged smiles. There was a twinkle in your eyes. For once, we seemed to be in the right place at the right time, an alternative reality. The show was everything Washington, DC (then), wasn’t. Such an unusual arrival tale, forming a lasting attachment over a weird TV show. We were outsiders in Washington’s conservative, close-knit culture—fugitives really. Washington had been so effectively corporatized it was no place for the whimsical. In Twin Peaks we found a hideaway where we could recover our lost selves. This is what sealed, as Shakespeare would say, our fate.

“One day,” said the Log Lady, “the sadness will end.” The Log Lady, Catherine Coulson, died last September. She was seventy-one. From cancer. And so she will not appear in Season 3 of Twin Peaks. We might have celebrated our twenty-fourth anniversary with the watching of episode one of the new series, and lamented together the passing of the Log Lady. Catherine Coulson kept her log, having bonded with her piece of ponderosa pine. The log is thought to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. “There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Sadness, in our ignorance, is very real. The tears are real. Then the day when sadness comes, we ask: will this sadness which makes me cry, will this sadness that makes my heart cry out—will it ever end? The answer, of course, is yes. One day the sadness will end.” So said the Log Lady—may she find peace.

The city’s silver maples have turned into Chinese lanterns, aglow in soft yellow and orange light. Layers of fallen leaves carpet the sidewalks in burgundy, purple, and browns, a vivid explosion of earthy hues and tones. So animated is the air with color and light I feel like a small figure in a giant painting. It’s the final outburst of radiant form before the dark and cold arrive in their generalized gloom, until the shoots of grasses, goldenrods, and other wildflowers rise out of the soil in spring. I’m clinging (in my prose) to the moment between lightness and dark. In my heart I am clinging to you; I am here beside you in the intricate space between the imaginary and the real.

I have a milkweed pod on my desk. Held the right way, the pod is the size of a bird without a head, five inches long, a bird with folded wings. My seedpod is dried out and has begun to open up like an oyster shell. (It’s a metaphor machine.) The brown angiosperm seeds inside seem eager to germinate, each a white silky fluff. The silk “parachutes” catch the wind and float far and wide over valley and mountain slopes, riding wind currents for days at a time. I can see Baron Munchausen soaring through space on a milkweed pod. Milkweed fluff was used in life jackets as a flotation device during World War II, by the way, collected by American schoolchildren. It’s quite buoyant. Some have stuffed pillows with milkweed fluff. In the veins of the milkweed plant flow the milky white sap used by Native Americans to remove warts. Somehow I know you’re listening.

Scheduled an appointment with the retirement guy. More forms to fill out. There’s this fund and that to roll over. I’m like the Borg, absorbing all of your assets. Matters have become complicated with your ING account, I should warn you, which is listed solely in your name with no beneficiary clause. I’ve had to lawyer up. The machinations necessary to retrieve this account are strange and daunting. There’s the creation of an estate, the appointment of an executor (me), letters testamentary (so that I can represent the “estate”), and so forth. And then there’s a legal public proceeding, probate court, where anyone on the planet (in legal terms creditors of the deceased) has four months to make a claim against your assets. All of these (your assets) will be listed and valued as part of the public record. So if you’re shy this won’t be pleasant. Do you have any creditors out there, invisible entities circling your corpse? Take the University Hospital. It keeps a close eye on the probate proceedings of the recently deceased, staking claims for unresolved hospital bills, just in case. And then there are probate fees I will pay, the lawyer’s and the state’s, a fixed percentage of your assets. This is all new to me and probably comical but also insane in a way only a novelist could enjoy. Call me K. Death is complicated. So many hidden variables—how not to feel implicated?

The meeting lasted well over an hour. The whole thing was pretty unnerving. Not the money part, thanks to your extreme frugality. It was the innuendos that spooked me. I took careful notes this time because this stuff goes in one ear and out the other. The TIAA guy had on his blue shirt, black tie (beware of men in black ties), and gray trousers. Today he had on his Mark Hamill look. Imagine a middle-age Luke Skywalker working for Geico. He’s a really nice guy, make no mistake about it. I think he enjoys these meetings. I got together with my team and we looked closely at your situation, he said, where your moneys are, your expected retirement date, your Social Security profile. How will this really look? That’s the question we ask, not just today but five, twenty, thirty years down the road. How do you create a thoughtful plan around your assets based on your goals? So here we have an overview of our agenda. You remember the four main areas of financial well-being? Not really, I said. Okay, there’s retirement income. The goal here is how to replace your salary with something you could feel good about down the road.

He pointed to another category on the whiteboard, asset allocation, which he called my sleepability. Sleepability? I asked. We don’t want you suffering from insom nia because of money concerns. Okay. Sounds good. Now your asset allocation—the combination of stocks, bonds, guarantees, fixed income, and real estate—we have to figure out how aggressive or conservative you want to be with these. Given the volatility of the market going forward, we need to make sure you are as diversified as possible. And then you need to determine your risk factor. Moderately conservative is what you told me earlier. That rings a bell, I said. Right now, with your assets, you are a little bit riskier than that.

That made me anxious. I already feel at risk. I don’t need to aggravate the diceyness of my situation. What can we do about that? I said timidly. But you also have the CD money, the money-market cash, etc., and these accounts are totally conservative. I think you’re in a good spot. You’re not too aggressive where you could lose 20 percent, if the market plunges, but it’s still working for you, depending on ups and downs. And, of course, the number of years you have left to live, whether it’s five or thirty. Jeez, that sounds dark. I try not to look that far into the future, I said, but I saw by the look on his face I was already there. So, he resumed, we want to make sure there’s sufficient moneys for any and all outcomes. How then do we silo your money. Since we’re in Iowa I like to use that term. For some reason I couldn’t think of grain storage but only missile silos. The TIAA guy drew four silos of varying height. The little silo was earmarked for emergency funds. You always want to have a certain amount of cash, he said, for the what-ifs. Say your roof blows off, your car explodes, or you lose a leg—who knows. You mean my whole leg? I said. Just a figure of expression, he said.

My TIAA advisor was beginning to sound a little like an Allstate commercial with the Mayhem guy. He was using hyperboles but they seemed awfully real to me. I honestly felt the roof of our house could blow off at any moment. Some people like to have more cash on hand, he said, for their own sleepability.

He named the last little tower the “never” silo. This was the storage bin for money I would never spend because I would be dead. The never silo was my legacy, money for my beneficiaries. Also, a hedge against catastrophic health problems. So we need to think about incapacity planning, he said. Unfortunately, this is just part of life. My palms were sweating by this point. The never silo was so ontologically spooky I felt light-headed. The TIAA guy asked if I needed coffee or water. I need to lie down, I said. I didn’t expect this meeting to be existentially disturbing. Remember, the RMD comes into effect automatically at age seventy and a half. So at a certain point in time, you will have to pay taxes on these accounts. They can’t be deferred indefinitely. But this is exactly what I want from money, I tell him. I want to defer my death indefinitely.

One day, we decide to teach the same class. We’re feeling nostalgic. We live in Washington, a city of lawyers and lobbyists. Too many Republicans, I say. I want to gag, you say. It’s so depressing. We miss the 1960s. So we collaborate on a syllabus about counterculture America. Drugs, music, war, dissent, conflict, angst. The whole works. This will be fun, I say. We’re in my kitchen drinking wine. My kitchen is so small you can’t cross your legs. You move the jade plant out of your way. We need Tom Wolfe, you say, the Kool-Aid book. Okay, I say. Good. How about Joan Didion’s Slouching? For sure, you say. What else? Well, how about Carlos Castaneda? I say. Really? you say. Castaneda and Huxley. Okay, you say. How about Ken Kesey? you ask. The Cuckoo Nest? Yes. By all means, I say. We’re halfway through the wine already, so I tell you my Ken Kesey story.

I’m working at this classy restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, and downstairs in the pastry room is Jack Kerouac’s daughter. You’re kidding, you say. No. Her name is Jan and she’s an assistant pastry chef. A very attractive woman. You are enjoying the merlot. I fetch corn chips. I even asked her out, believe it or not, I say, reaching into the cupboard. But she looked right through me, like I was a window pane. Didn’t say a word. Out of your league, maybe, you say. Absolutely. More wine? Yes. But it’s possible she had a drug problem.

Well, one afternoon Ken Kesey drives up. Wait, what’s Ken Kesey doing there? He lives across the tracks, I say, in Springfield, a blue-collar town. Everyone there works for the lumber giant, Weyerhaeuser. I lived there too for a while. The whole place smells like cardboard on LSD. What does he look like in person? you ask. Short and stocky, balding curly hair. Looks like a fighter who hangs out in Irish pubs. Another glass of wine? Sure. Anyway, Kesey drives up in a convertible, charges through the back door, descends the rickety stairs, grabs Jan Kerouac by the hand, and races back upstairs and out the door. Off to Albuquerque. Vroom goes his convertible. I think it was a T-Bird. We never see Jack’s daughter again. The pastry girl vanishes. Why Albuquerque? you ask. Some kind of event on the Beat generation, I think. So we both agree to add On the Road to the list. By the end of the bottle, there’s over forty books on our syllabus.

Indian summer continues well into November. Balmy and seductive. The white oak’s leaves are turning dark red like wine. Autumn’s slow fade, its long goodbye. A squirrel gnawing on a walnut pauses for a moment to look at me. He’s perched on a limb. We are eye to eye. But as I’m standing perfectly still, he is puzzled. What am I? He can’t tell. He takes the walnut from his mouth, darting his head to the right and left. He really needs to know. What am I? he wonders. Just to be safe, he scurries up the spindly limbs of the maple, returns the walnut to his mouth, and begins re-gnawing. He keeps his big eyes on me, though. Not to be trusted, he thinks. Small bits of walnut shell fall from the squirrel’s mouth onto the carpet of maple leaves. It’s the sound of dry rain. Partly covered by leaves is an empty bottle of Corona Extra at the base of the tree. A fossil trace of primate culture. The nearby ginkgo is the last to turn colors, from flamboyant green to drunken yellow. This one is a girl and has begun to drop her fleshy nuts. If you can get past its repulsive smell, the ginkgo nut is a thing of beauty. It tastes like a plum, I’m told, though more complicated. In a hundred years, which is a flash of light, will any of this be here?

These are things we would not have paused by to see on our walk. They matter now more than ever. Later today I stopped on my way up the stairs in midflight and sat down. You flashed before my eyes. Again, the horrible gasping for air, the fading light of your eyes, your body stretched out for sleep. My coffee spilled, little brown splatters staining the bright maple treads. I sprawled on the landing like a midnight drunk, rehearsing my own heart attack or stroke. You didn’t see it coming. I see mine only too well.