27.

Twenty-seven days may be too long to wait.

Today, then? And let others sort out the mess.

My kitchen, my world:

On the counter, toast crumbs, empty Pepsi cans, ant traps. Vials of Prilosec, Lopressor and Naprosyn on the table beside the laptop. Overhead, dead bugs in the concentric grooves of the glass shade covering the light. A whunk, as the Nixon-era refrigerator cycles on. Up above, a football game on Mrs. N’s TV. Does any of this entice me to go on living? Guess.

What a relief it will be not to have to fill up weekend days like this one. (How long can you read the newspaper while lingering over your Frosted Flakes? How long can you outrun the question, Why am I bothering? Isn’t it obvious, when I find myself searching for chores to do— what do I need at CVS? Is it time for an oil change, or new underwear?—that this show should have been cancelled long ago?)

Five Benadryls would knock me out. A Hefty bag sealed with duct tape would finish me off. Let’s see if I have the supplies on hand.

Nope, all out of trash bags. Off to the supermarket I go. On my merry way.

The flesh is weak in so many ways, Bob. Though I went for suicide gear, I also came home with a tub of orange sherbet, Little Debbie Swiss Rolls, sour cream and onion chips, and a six-pack of Yuengling. One last binge.

While I enjoy the sherbet, I think I’ll cast one last glance back across time. I wonder whether H. G. Wells kept notebooks too, and visited them later in life. Bing! Inspiration!

She got me again.

I thought the wound had closed, but I was wrong.

For the last hour, I’ve been staring helplessly into the darkness of What If, and No, It Couldn’t Have Been, and If Only I’d.

This makes no sense to you, Bob. I’ll clarify (and hope that telling the tale will cure the fever).

In a notebook from 1987, I found something that stopped me. A short story, supposedly, but the only fiction was that I made it up.

Years have passed since I shut this out. I’d forgotten her, after believing for half my life that I never would.

What am I supposed to do with this?

Long ago, before I became me, I met Lena Sjöman while traveling on a train from Munich to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. She had a round bowl of brown hair, red canvas sneakers, and a red sweatshirt that matched her high-boned cheeks; she was studying a German phrase book. She concealed her beauty behind the plainest of trappings—a virgin princess, striving to escape notice—but the simple clothes and the blushing cheeks worked on me like a potion. Ravenously lonely, I asked if I could look at the map she had open on her lap.

We ended up touring Garmisch for two days together. All I remember is walking uphill to the Café Panorama in a thick fog, passing the twelve Stations of the Cross on the way, and seeing nothing but Lena.

She ditched me fairly abruptly, deciding she needed to head south to Florence. I understood that I wasn’t invited. This was long before I put on weight—it wasn’t that. No, she ran away because I’d fallen in love with her. According to Lena, this habit of falling instantly in love is a particular folly of Americans. I patriotically resisted the slander, though later—after much pain—I did accept the part about falling in love being a mistake. You yearn to meet the one who’ll complete you, but at best, you get a few weeks of mutual self-deception, all the while hiding from the suspicion that This Isn’t Really It.

Anyhoo . . .

I should give myself a bit of a break here. It was impossible not to fall in love with her. To cite just one reason, the way she pronounced Tycho Brahe stirred my brain like a swizzle stick: a murmur, lips pursed, and then the quiet tick of the k sound, like a marble tapping glass.

She was always analyzing my errors, psychotherapizing, political-theorizing. I suppose it was her way of holding me off, keeping the adoring puppy at arm’s length. Back then, though, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to argue so much.

For a year, I wrote her letters, transmuting my longing into multipage outpourings of playful wit. She wrote back terse, impersonal nullities on weightless blue tissue paper.

Nevertheless, I studied Swedish and allowed my fantasies to bloom and proliferate. The following summer, I visited her. She hugged me at the train station, a friendly, floppy hug, and I told myself this was everything I’d hoped for. It was all downhill from there. She already had a boyfriend—a fact she’d mentioned in Garmisch, which I had stubbornly ignored. He was an aged American expat professor whose English had deformed over time. The agonies climaxed my first night there, in a room with a cold stone floor and tall, open windows. Sheer curtains billowed in the breeze like grieving ghosts. She assaulted me for selfishly trying to make myself the center of her life. She also critiqued the personality I’d sculpted for myself—the pose of urbane disdain—as a suit of armor that I hid inside, fearfully. What could I say to that? Same to you, Bud. No, I couldn’t reply at all. I simply sat with my lips slightly apart, conveying innocence and injury.

That should have been the end of the story, but I’d flown across an ocean to see her, and had nowhere else to go. Six days of torment followed. We visited the rocky shore where The Seventh Seal was filmed; attended a Communist party (birthday of a leftist friend); and took the hydrofoil across the channel to Copenhagen, where we strolled in the Tivoli Gardens and gawked at the Little Mermaid in the harbor. In spite of her outbursts of exasperation, I couldn’t believe that she felt nothing for me. It didn’t seem possible, given my admiration and yearning, my devotion to her. Always, I hoped she would finally give in and snuggle against me.

It didn’t happen. By the time I flew home, getting away was a relief. I doubted life would bring me any happiness from then on, and it seems I was right.

Oddly, however, she came to stay with me for a week the next summer, at my old apartment in Jersey City. (If she couldn’t stand me, then why did she come? I’ve always clung to this as proof that I wasn’t crazy to hope—but it may be that she couldn’t pass up the chance for free lodging ten minutes from New York City.) By this time, I had changed. She’d succeeded in burning away my belief in love. She slept on a foam mattress on my floor—I bought it just for her—and I never touched her. She appreciated my restraint so much that she commented cheerfully on how well we were getting along. I bore my burden stoically, and took her all over Manhattan, from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge. (We walked across in a heavy wind. The bridge swayed under our feet; her T-shirt blew up above her shoulders, exposing her breasts, which were no more than pale swellings. This registered as nothing but a neutral fact.)

On our last night together, after steak and wine in my apartment, she confessed that she’d never been able to show affection straightforwardly. Instead, any time she liked a boy, she would hit him. Later in the evening, demonstrating how old-time tennis players planted their feet solidly on the ground (did I mention that she had been a champion in her teens?), she took my old wooden Slazenger racquet and hit me with it—playful taps on the back of the thigh, on the arm, on the hip.

That’s what skewered me, Bob. That’s what left me haunted and obsessed, like an Edgar Allan Poe madman, seeking his beloved beyond the grave. Lena sent me a message in the code she had taught me, and the message said, What you’ve wanted for two years, more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life, more than you’ll ever want anything again, I offer to you now. And I let the offer pass.

It wasn’t that I missed the signal. I just couldn’t believe it. She had trained me to understand that I was foolish, self-centered and wrong to want her. Like a dog shocked repeatedly by an invisible fence, I dared not put a paw over the line. Unlike Charlie Brown, I refused to believe that, this time, Lucy would let me kick the football. Rather than make that mistake, I chose to forgo happiness for all time.

Now, though—

I can’t make my mind sit still. Any man with a beating heart would have held her, stroked her red cheeks. If I’d kissed her, the last thirty years might have been unrecognizable, the opposite of what was.

Or, maybe nothing would have changed.

I’ll never know.

I shouldn’t accuse myself this way. I couldn’t have behaved differently, any more than I can will myself, right now, to do a thousand push-ups. Someone else might have—not me.

Even if we had kissed, etc., she still would have climbed into her cab in the morning and gone back to Sweden.

I hear her saying her nonsense word, Shingaling. I see her walking beside a golden field, telling me that this crop is called raps (which isn’t in my Swedish-English dictionary), and that the pure blue sky above us, together with the yellow raps, gives her country’s flag its colors. I ask if I’ll ever see her again after I return home, and she says, “Mebbe.”

It’s not fair to blame her for the souring that followed. Everyone rejects somebody sometime. I’ve left my share of disappointed women behind—all because they couldn’t compare with Lena. (Hillary comes to mind, with her obsessive collection of Disney figurines.)

I can’t wriggle free of this hook, though. Somehow, somewhere, we could have been together.

Sleeping. Waking. And back to sleep again. If only I could drift off forever.

If I’d changed careers and gone to work as a kindergarten teacher, a job Lena respected, and then I’d flown to see her one more time . . .

Impossible to sustain the fantasy. It’s like a computer game, when you stray past the borders of the programmed world, into the gray zone where nothing is. Us, Together: two words that, side by side, make no sense.

I found her, Bob.

Four other Lena Sjömans appeared, but only one in her old town, offering Psykologi & Psykoterapi. (Vad söker du? the search menu asked: What do you seek?) I have her e-mail address, and her telefon. I could call her right now.

More terrifying than death, by far.

Hello, Lena. Do you recognize my voice?

Angus?

Good of you to remember me.

It has been so many years. Can you say so? (She asked that often. Using me to improve her English.)

I just wanted you to know . . . (What? That I’m about to kill myself and thought I’d say hi?) . . . that you’re still inside me.

No, that makes me sound like a carnivorous whale.

I think, in your nun-like way, you were afraid to be with someone who passionately desired and admired you, as opposed to a peculiar old man. I assume he’s dead now?

No, he is my husband. But he is sick. Really, it is sad. (Rilly, she used to say. My face tingles, remembering.) He lives only a short time now.

So you’ll be available soon.

If I actually dialed her number, though, what would happen?

1) I wouldn’t recognize her voice—changed, older, harsh—and I’d have to face the fact that my Lena no longer exists.

2) She would ask, Why do you call me? and I would have no answer.

3) Her pedantic lecturing would annoy me.

4) She would ask what I’ve been doing all this time, and my answer, no matter how I put it, would show both of us that I’ve done absolutely nothing with my life—a fact I accept, but hearing her say, Mm-hm . . .

If we arranged to meet, she would see what I became. Which must never happen.

I don’t know what to do with myself, BB. I fled just now to a different notebook, desperate for distraction, and found on every page a strained pose of superiority and lame attempts at cleverness. Everything I wrote on those lined pages was a received idea. My time would have been better spent bowling.

My shin is throbbing again, a souvenir of the sack race. The painful pulse offers a sort of relief—something else to think about, for a few moments, at least.

Experimenting, I put the trash bag over my head just now. It’s not opaque from the inside, in case you ever wondered. I could see everything, as if through brown smoke and a dirty windshield. Warmth quickly surrounded my head, the November chill disappeared. Not unpleasant at all.

Wonder of wonders, I just had a visitor, first in years. Panting up the stairs, bunched-up bag in hand, I found Jerri White at my door—my boss, a dark-brown beanpole with bug eyes and hoop earrings. She’s been trying to reach me since Friday night, when I turned off the ringer on my phone and stopped checking e-mail. She knows I live alone, she said, and was afraid “something might have happened.” Eyeing the black bag, she asked, “Are you in the middle of something?”

“No, I’m all done.”

Neither she nor any of my coworkers has ever seen my apartment, and that’s not an accident. She didn’t ask to be let in, and I didn’t invite her. We had our tête-à-tête at the top of my stairs.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, stuffy-nosed.

Most of the time, Jerri is all brusque business, but now and then a tender soul peeps forth. You can tell it’s happening because she looks at you.

“I’m involved in a personal matter, Jerri. I can’t accept an assignment right now, if that’s why you’re here.”

She pinched her lips together, expressing pained indignation. “That’s not why I came,” i.e., We’ve known each other for ten years. I thought you might have dropped dead.

The truth didn’t take long to come out, however: Hendricks House is holding its annual gala the Friday after this one. The theme is a celebration of the clients I’ve profiled, and they want me to speak. Dr. Jones himself called her to make the request.

“I’m sure you’d rather not,” she said, “but that would be hard to explain. The publisher plays squash with Dr. Jones. I’m asking you to do what they want, as a favor to me.”

A different editor might have put it more bluntly. You’ll do this and not fuck up, or I’ll stab you in the eyeballs, and any other balls I find on you. But Jerri never raises her voice, never indulges in flavorful language. Her M.O. is quiet blackmail. (Smart, self-conscious, unmarried and ill-suited to the supervisor’s role, she has a master’s from Columbia, yet here she is, trapped in the Tales of Our Towns department, with amber deodorant stains at the armpits of her white blouses and no idea how to escape. Poor soul!)

My sympathy for Jerri has a limit. I won’t perform like a eunuch emcee for a ballroom full of self-satisfied oncologists and dentists—not for her sake or anyone else’s.

The time had come to burn some bridges. If I really mean what I’ve been chattering about, then I had to give my notice. If not, then I had to stop playing make-believe and get back to work, because there are bills to pay.

Looking into my boss’s froggish eyes, I said, “Sorry, Jerri. I’ve loathed this job since the first day. I can’t write another sentence for you. And you’ll have to find another after-dinner speaker.”

Where was the exhilaration? You don’t free yourself from indentured servitude every day—but there was Jerri, avoiding the sight of my face, embarrassed by my rudeness—a peculiar, nervous woman who now had to tell the saintly Dr. Jones that he couldn’t have his way.

The sound of weeping came from behind my back. On the other side of the wall, in Mrs. N’s kitchen, Eka struggled to speak. Gulps of Georgian tumbled out amid sobs. She rarely has visitors; she must have been on the phone.

In that narrow space, with unhappy women fore and aft, I tried to wrap things up and get back to business. “It shouldn’t be hard to replace me. Any English-speaking primate will do.”

“I’m sorry, Angus. I should have noticed you were unhappy. I could have found more interesting things for you to do. I still can. Would you let me try?”

I hope you’ll forgive me, Bob, for jesting in the face of her earnestness. “As Descartes said just before he mysteriously vanished, ‘I think not.’ ”

Time to say good night. My stomach is reproaching me for the Yuengling, the chips, the sherbet. With luck, I’ll pass out quickly.

1:10 A.M.

Darkness beyond the windows. I’m an island of insomnia in a slumbering world.

Slow ticking from a hidden pipe. The radiator whistles a melancholy note.

Somewhere in Sweden, Lena is dreaming her early morning dreams. I send my soul to her across the sea. Remember me?