IN THE LAND OF LOST TYPISTS

There are three others typing on laptops here, one old and two young. Breathing the nut-rich coffee air, we search for wisdom and relief through our fingertips, quickly clicking. I wonder what griefs they’re analyzing and bemoaning. I wonder if they’re making more progress than I am.

The boy barista tells the girl, “I can’t believe I’m going to A.C. on New Year’s Day.”

“What, and, like, gamble?”

The boy has a wispy beard and a Devil’s Tower of black hair. The girl has little hoops through her lip and nostril. I must be a thousand years old.

It’s late, dark, cold. I don’t know what to do, how to live. By keeping these words flowing, I hope to stumble on something.

Over my head, holiday songs play on a flat TV. Children sing sleepily, Christmas time is here. I remember the first time the cartoon aired. Charlie Brown and his meager tree, a squiggle above his head standing for his fizzled dreams. That’s all I can retrieve, though. My memories, which once seemed durable as stone, are crumbling. The names of my early teachers have left me. Everything is falling apart, tumbling over the edge.

Where to begin?

With this: they worried about me. While I passed last night and today at Adesina’s apartment, Eka and Bob called my cell phone (which I’d turned off), searched the neighborhood on foot, waited up for hours, called the police to ask about accidents, and finally reported me missing. I regret causing turmoil, and wish they’d written me off instead. Must I be made to feel like an inconsiderate asshole when I’m already drowning in woe?

The moment of my return was tricky. I couldn’t tell from her up-sloping, sorrowful-saint eyebrows whether she wanted to come to me but was afraid I hated her, or simply pitied me. She watched from the bottom of the stairs as I made my way down. I had my own contorted longings; above all, I wanted not to lose hold of my self-control and beg her to stay. With a simple “Hi,” I hung my coat over the newel cap, its accustomed place, and went to the kitchen for a beer.

Davit mumbled in his sleep. Eka and Bob questioned me quietly, and told how they’d searched the streets, etc., etc. I apologized and called the police to report myself found.

A thorny question arose. I waited until Bob stepped away, and asked it quietly. “Where do we think I ought to sleep tonight?”

“On your bed,” Eka insisted.

Having used up my audacity, I didn’t ask where she planned to sleep. I just went to the bedroom and left the door open.

She followed me in, but kept her distance. “If you allow, I sleep here with you. If you don’t want, I go out on the floor.”

As if it made no difference, I said, “No, no, you can stay, it’s fine.”

Once she climbed under the covers, though—as the poet said, oh, baby, that’s when the heartache began.

Would we lie on our backs all night, separate as a pair of light switches, staring at the dark ceiling?

The scent of her perfume, dabbed on quickly as she changed into her flannel nightgown: cruelly inflammatory.

Her fingers in my chest curls: an almost unbearable joy.

The sound of our nibbling kisses in the quiet: a bit slurpy, and therefore embarrassing.

Her arms and shoulders beneath the flannel: tender skin and mature flesh concealing sturdy muscles underneath.

(Turn the laptop, so passersby can’t read the screen— though how many nosy pedestrians are likely to pass a Starbucks in Nutley so close to midnight?)

The taste of her mouth: mint toothpaste with a stubborn hint of onion.

Most of all, her hands on my cheek, my shoulder, my scalp: miraculous.

It would have been hard to miss the message. She wanted to make sure I understood what I hadn’t two nights before, when her report of Dr. Oh’s invitation had shot me out of the house like a human cannonball. Ask me to stay. The answer will be yes.

The time came for words. She waited patiently.

Here’s the thing. What she wants isn’t the deciding factor. She has no idea what staying with me entails. I may never find another job. (Would you hire me?) I’ll most likely have a heart attack within a few years. And what happens when the magic dust wears off? The Angus she wants to accept is the kindly soul who sheltered her and her son, not the cur who rudely mocks luckless amputees. She offered herself to me—but I couldn’t let her doom herself.

Long after any other man would have accepted the invitation and fit his puzzle piece into hers, she paused in the half dark and asked with her eyes, What is wrong?

I love her, but couldn’t let her choose me over Dr. Oh. I squeezed her upper arm under the nightgown’s sleeve, and said nothing.

She moved away gently and carefully, so as not to rend her dignity, and spent the rest of the night on her side, very still, her back a defensive barricade. I don’t think she was crying—she has survived harder trials than this.

I cared enough about her not to touch her again.

You think I’m deluding myself, that of course Eka and I belong together and I’m making every possible excuse to escape happiness, just so I can go back to saying that life sucks. What you haven’t considered is that I may be right. I’m not even a poor facsimile of the man she should marry. She would never have conceived this misplaced affection if calamity hadn’t dumped her in my lap. Not even true love can survive the disappointments of poverty.

I’m right. Admit it. Sometimes the shithead knows what he’s talking about.

The two younger typists have gone. Only the gray woman is left. Serious, professional, mouth shaped by years of frustration, she’s got her down coat on, her papers spread across the table in front of her. There’s an impatience about her. She fidgets. Whatever her pain is about, whatever has led her to this dead end, she has my sympathy.

Eka called Dr. Oh early this morning, while I slept. He promised to come get her and her belongings at two P.m. He must have cancelled his afternoon appointments.

By the time she told me her plans, she had become a different woman: detached and monosyllabic. Lack of sleep had put creases in her face.

Because most of her things were in the bedroom, she couldn’t pack until I woke. I heard the folded clothing going softly into the suitcase while I ate my toast.

The clatter of her framed icons returning to the cardboard box nearly broke my will. She’s getting away. You’ll never find another woman. This is your last chance.

To prevent an unseemly breakdown, I left the apartment. At Willowbrook, scene of our recent happiness, I found many mothers with strollers lunching at the food court. An aggressive beauty with an accent tried to sell me natural soap made with Dead Sea salt; I stared at her, wordless.

Upstairs, looking down on the shoppers, I leaned on the railing (go ahead and break, let me come crashing down) and tried to cultivate a sense of relief, because now I won’t have to live up to her idea of me. When that failed, I reminded myself of the reasons why I hadn’t asked her to stay. Sydney Carton found peace in self-sacrifice, but he didn’t have to live with it for another twenty years.

I accept that I don’t have the right to drag her down with me, but how can she be happy with Dr. Oh?

Below me, a small boy strapped into a stroller reached desperately for the toy helicopter fluttering around a nearby kiosk. His mother, busy chatting, never noticed.

I stayed away until three. On the way home, I let myself hope she’d still be there, having told Dr. Oh to go to hell. You big dummy-dum, she would scold me, you almost letted me to get away.

My wish came true in a twisted way, as wishes so often do. Approaching the house, I saw a black Mercedes in front, shining and clean, its trunk open. Eka was giving Bob a good-bye hug. Dr. Oh, tensely smiling in a blazer with a violet shirt, closed the trunk.

I guess the plan was to pick up Davit at school. Dr. Oh jingled his keys. Bob caught sight of me and pretended he hadn’t.

I parked down the street and watched her like a wino gaping at a liquor store window.

Her face was neutral, which enraged me. Why wasn’t she weeping? And why had she left the decision to me, a bumbling idiot?

Bob couldn’t help glancing my way again. This time, she followed his eyes and found me. Nothing passed between us except a missed heartbeat on my side. She climbed into the doctor’s car, and a crack opened in my chest, a gap that has widened in the hours since.

A dusting of snow had fallen. Dr. Oh pulled away from the curb a little too fast, and slid a bit before straightening out. Incompetent, I muttered, taking consolation where I could.

He drove past me, never noticing my face. The upholstery inside the Mercedes was dark tan, a close cousin to gold. Eka’s posture was impeccable.

I couldn’t go inside. I couldn’t make myself move.

Bob came toward me, hesitantly. His Birkenstocks made bean tracks in the snow.

I lowered the window an inch.

“I’m sorry,” he offered. “Do you want to talk?”

I was unable to produce a word—a syllable—a whimper.

“She told me you never asked her to stay,” he said. “Why didn’t you?”

I could barely breathe. “Go inside, Bob.”

“She told me she wished she could stay. Did you know that?”

“Drop it, please.”

“Why wouldn’t you ask? Was it some sort of insane pride?”

“Get away from me.”

He shook his head, but I was spared a lecture, because he had to get back to the library. Today was his first day at his new job. He’d taken a break to say good-bye to Eka, and stayed too long.

She thinks I don’t want her. It’s intolerable—I can’t let her go on believing that—but would explaining the truth be more merciful? That I love her, but would rather Dr. Oh have her?

Bob’s sympathy left my guts so agitated that I wondered: Stomach cancer? This was the state Don found me in when he came to pay his respects.

It must have struck him as odd that I kept sitting in my car in the midafternoon chill, after Eka had driven off with her dapper, ecstatic suitor—especially since he’d heard her toast me two nights earlier.

I rolled down the window again. “She’s gone?” he asked gently.

“Yup.”

He curled his lips in, gravely.

“You okay?”

“Peachy.”

The thoughts that pop into one’s head. Peach . . . Georgia . . . Eka . . . No, Duane Allman . . . He got run over by a peach truck, I think—that’s why they called the next album “Eat a Peach.” (Actually, no, Snopes informs me that this is a myth. One more lie I’ve gone around believing for eons.)

Don might have stood there nodding for the next seven years if I hadn’t dismissed him. “I think I’ll go in now,” I said.

He blurted out what I mistook for his idea of consolation: “Sometimes it seems like we weren’t made to be happy.”

I didn’t comment, so he elaborated on his own. “I told Cindy I couldn’t leave Denise. I just couldn’t.”

At that instant, he became my only peer, my fellow sufferer, my best friend. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, it’s all for the best. It was really something, for a little while—but I’m good. I’m too old to start over.”

Snow was falling again. Ashes. Dust.

And then Cindy herself showed up, home from work. Seeing us as she left her car, she froze for a moment. Face clenched in grief, pale—now that I think about it, she wasn’t wearing makeup, a first (nor was she smiling, another first)—she went behind the house to her entrance, turning her face away from us.

“Maybe you can check in on her sometimes,” Don said. “Just to make sure she’s all right.”

A quick assessment. I’ll ask Bob to do it. He’s better at that. And climbing stairs.

“Listen,” he said, “if you need anything, or want someone to talk to, just come on over.”

I nodded, and he drifted back to his house. I went inside soon after—that is, I almost made it to my door, but a red and black Mini Cooper pulled up at the curb, and a mini person climbed out.

“You look like you’ve had a setback,” Dr. Jones said.

A faint scent came off him, fresh, clean, citrusy. I suppressed the urge to tell all. “Nope, not me. What brings you to this remote outpost?”

“I called Dr. Oh this morning, to see how your friend was doing. He told me a surprising story.”

He watched me for signs of imminent breakdown. I gave him nothing.

“I was afraid that what happened might be disheartening, from your point of view.”

“You see all, don’t you?”

He brings out the paranoid in me like no one else: had he plotted the entire course of events, in revenge for my online slurs?

We ended up standing outside for many minutes while he consoled and counseled me. “Quitting a job is a double-edged sword,” he said. “Everyone wants to be free, but sometimes, if you cut yourself loose, you end up adrift. When you don’t have a place to go every day—it’s harder than people realize. Don’t misunderstand me, I admire your nerve. But when you take a big gamble, there’s always a chance you’ll lose.”

Listening to this eminent little fellow diagnose my difficulties massaged a tender region in my brain. I saw him, fleetingly, as the older brother I never had. Unconsciously hostile, subtly condescending, but having my best interests at heart.

“There’s a vein of self-destructive unhappiness in you that I’ve never understood,” he said. “I wonder if leaving your job has turned into more of a problem than a solution.”

He puffed a warm cloud into his hands as if conjuring a magic snowball. I had already succumbed to his spell, but I kept up the appearance of sovereignty by maintaining aloof silence.

“What I wanted to tell you is, if you decide to come out of retirement, I’d like to help.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Hendricks House has a branch in Fort Lauderdale. They’d like to replicate the arrangement we have here with the Register. I made a couple calls, to see what’s possible. Would you consider a fresh start in a new place?”

Mr. Misery Goes to Florida. Heat. Flatness. Parents. Hell on Earth, with air-conditioning.

“May I ask you a question, Doctor?”

“Of course.”

“Why do you keep helping me out of the holes I dig for myself? Or do you do this for all God’s creatures?”

He calculated his answer carefully. “I think it’s because, for all your problems, I envy the way you refuse to do what’s expected. I wish I had the nerve to live as recklessly as you do.”

Falling snow glinted in the gray light like diamond dust. Was he giving me honesty, or a ludicrous lie that only a broken man would swallow—because, really, all he wanted was to banish the Masked Marauder to a steamy penal colony a thousand miles away?

He offered his hand for a good-bye shake. “If you’re interested in the job, let me know.”

I’d forgotten for a moment how small he is. The handshake broke the spell; he became a munchkin again as he returned to his model car. It defies the laws of physics, that a person of such negligible mass can exert so much gravitational force.

“Thanks,” I said as he drove away.

It’s almost closing time. My compañera, the other lost typist, has packed her papers and her laptop into a zebra-striped satchel. Now she’s standing and zipping her long, quilted coat. Will she acknowledge me, her fellow sufferer, the only other customer in the place?

No. Slipping her wrist through the cuff of an aluminum crutch, she sways like a metronome, back and forth, out the door. “Good night, Kate!” the boy barista calls.

She sends them both a fond, maternal smile. “Get home safe, guys.”

A gust of frigid air engulfs me.

I had hoped that, by the time I reached the end of this, the fog would have cleared, revealing the path I ought to take. No such luck.

Florida?

Why not?