Mr. Oral Fixation says before he hangs up, “Stand firm, man. Buck up. We’re working this from every angle, and we’ll take care of it. Our people are talking to the Zurkus people. Trust me.” There’s no platitude like those of the uncomfortable to the inconsolable.
The white phone with the note taped to it doesn’t ring very often, and when it does, the news isn’t great. After two weeks of living in this beach cabin, I’m ready to blast out of here. No teacher can relax. Always more papers to grade, more lessons to prep, changes to our field of study. Here I am without a library, without my lab books, with nothing but notes taped to every cabinet and drawer. One black-and-white TV with rabbit ears and one station. This cabin owner? The queen of skinflints.
Angle of re-entry is what Kyle never got right. He was a rocket ship, trying to come back to earth, to the mother ship. His mass traveling from space back to earth had to accelerate to a certain speed and hit our atmosphere at a certain angle, descending between 30 and 35 degrees. Less than 28 degrees and the traveler bounces back out into space. More than 38 degrees and the traveler burns up.
Kyle hit it just wrong. Young Sir Nihilist, he couldn’t make us understand the perils of nuclear bombs, couldn’t protect himself from predators, couldn’t face being in one place in one time. More than 38 degrees. His place and time were other, were motion, and entering the realities of this world, which is what the young men and women of this nubile age do in boarding school, put too much drag on his system. Reality burnt him up.
That’s not to say our guilt has been expunged.
Two weeks in this beach cottage, and I’ve folded every beetle, bug, and bird I know. Give me a sheet of paper and a half an hour, and I can fold just about anything. The skinflint cottage owner keeps wrapping paper in a trunk in the attic. Pretty and thin and musty. Each crease will make spider webs of creases. Each fold must be considered. No margin for error.
So far I’ve filled half the trunk.
Every morning before sunrise I walk the flat shoal of Rehoboth Beach, the tide changing each day, the low tide so low it expands the land mass of this isthmus by half. On one side the Atlantic, on the other the bay. There’s always someone out there, someone with a dog, the dog alert to gulls and its master. Carla and I never walked the beach in the morning.
By lunch time I’m inside folding or reading or writing something down, something for a class if I ever get to teach again. Mr. Finished at finishing school.
By afternoon I’m walking the shops, finding the Satsumas or the fresh scallops or stargazer lilies. No one knows my name despite the earnest greetings by the shop owners.
Back at the cottage, I nap, wash the fish, cut up vegetables, arrange the flowers. A single man cannot afford to skirt domestic chores. After a nap, something I’ve learned to do in the last two weeks, I turn on the news from the black-and-white set. That voice on the news is the first I’ve really heard all day, the first I want to hear.
Tonight I hear my name on the news.