This story is about a man watching a broken clock. So if I announce the time and it’s the same as before, it’s not a mistake. It’s one-eighteen a.m. Sometimes it’s hard to think about anything besides thinking about what you’re thinking. Like when a novel’s main character is an author. Tomorrow I’m going to church, I think. I’ve got nothing better to do. Although church isn’t so bad; there are worse things than going to church that I could do. If I didn’t think in words I could think faster. Like that last thought – I thought of it before I formed the words – those words that I didn’t need to perform in my head in my own voice. It’s something we do to keep ourselves company, I think. But it’s not really my own voice – it’s not my own, really, because our voices sound different to us; they resonate in our skulls and wind up sounding deeper and more powerful. So the voice I use in my head is a voice that no one but me hears. I wonder if I could listen to myself on tape and learn to think in that voice, my real voice.
I’m short and skinny; people say I’m small. You’re so small! they say, when I squeeze behind chairs at bars, or when I’m picking out shirts, or when I log-roll under the coffee table to make people laugh. I have black hair. I don’t know if I can describe my face. I don’t know if I need to describe anything about myself, except that it’s one of those sounds that a story emits, like a frog’s croak – the croak is part of what makes it seem like a frog. My eyes are probably deep-set. Green. Thick eyebrows? I should pluck them where they meet in the middle. Where are my tweezers?
I want to catch the early church service. Is it one-eighteen? No, the clock is broken. I’m pretty sure counting sheep really works, as long as you imagine them vividly enough. They have to jump over the fence in your mind with their wooly sides flapping in technicolor and dolby digital and if you can do it right you can try to smell them. It takes a lot of concentration. If I stop concentrating, the sheep stop, or slide backwards in reverse motion, the curtain falls. Then I’ll be awake again, and start thinking about something like church or that other thing that’s worth saving for later. I’m summoning the scene and everything and I’m going to stop thinking words and just count. Starting now. One, two, three, four, five six…
* * * * *
… twelve. Shit, how long have I been saying twelve? That’s a damn loud bird. I can’t check the time because the clock just says one-eighteen a.m. Here I go, I am thinking, here I go. Here I go. Where? Strange how your thoughts can be incoherent when you’re very much alive and aware. Is it possible that I’m dreaming lucidly? What’s that light outside? If I lift the shade… no, there’s nothing. A trick of the dark.
I can never remember the sermons when I was a kid. At church. The sermons at church. I didn’t ever remember them. I could get caught up, sometimes, but they would just roll on and without stopping and I would daydream or think about my ass hurting and my head might start to spin. Did my head spin? So I wouldn’t take any of it with me after it was over. I watched other people shifting their weight around, too. But I have the impression that the sermons were good. That’s part of why I’m going tomorrow. That’s a part of it. That I want to see a good sermon, right? I don’t think my pillow fits.
That doesn’t make sense.
I mean it doesn’t fit my shoulder so well. Not in this position… not in any position, really.
An absolute whirlpool. A dishwasher full of clanking and banging and loosely organized things. That’s how the street will be tomorrow, on my way to church. I’ll walk so I’ll be in the thick. The thick of it. Does a dishwasher fill completely with water? Tomorrow it will be humid and soapy, hard to wade through streets of church-goers and fruit-shoppers. I think a sermon about love would be good. There’s always the connection to God’s love. For that, I think, a preacher would give good advice about relationships. A side-effect of piety.
Have you ever opened a dishwasher when it was running? A great cube of water doesn’t come splashing out. Before you have time to peer in to confirm what you already know – that you botched the job and have to go again from the beginning – water’s already draining down into the abyss and you can’t see how much had been in there. But I don’t think it ever fills completely, like a pool.
Yesterday I was nose-deep in the town paper. The news is smaller, closer, slower, but no more or less repetitive than national papers. Prone to being quirky, but also, finally, useful. Anyway I wasn’t reading too many articles. What first met my eyes were the ads. The ads! So many of them. Black and white pictures of homes. Car tires. A new pizza place opening. The images stacked on each other like tetris between the short articles about deer populations and student work projects. I don’t usually even look at the paper. I’d picked this one out of the basket in the living room where I was sitting, waiting for water to boil for spaghetti. I should have started frying the sausages sooner, instead of looking for the paper. I threw the whole schedule out of whack.
I’ve been making a lot of spaghetti. I like to cut the noodles because they’re too long and the vodka sauce slaps into your face when you slurp. Vodka sauce is the only sauce. The only good sauce anymore. Not the only sauce but really the only one I like to buy. The other ones are dark, chunky, garlic. I think. I don’t know what I think. Nothing. With the vodka sauce I make spicy sausages. I cut them once long-ways and fry them in the pan and season them and flip them and get a sear on the back then cut them into square-bottomed half-moons and fry them more and throw them in the sauce which has been simmering and pour all of that over the pasta. I don’t think parmesan cheese helps. I should try some other ones. Gouda? And use a peeler to make those larger flakes.
Reading the paper I forgot the sausages and didn’t have time to fry them again in pieces. They were softer. But I forgave myself. In an empty house you have to take on both roles: the repentant and the beneficent.
A priest is like a doctor for the soul. Maybe. What is it that people don’t like about doctors? Nobody likes being dismissed. Doctors, supposedly, say take an aspirin and we’ll talk tomorrow. I’m not sure they really do that, but it’s kind of a metaphor. Or a metonymy. Representative.
The pizza place in the paper said it had just opened. But I knew that place. It’d been open for several months, at least since the paper was printed. I know, because I’ve checked the date at the top of the page: August 3rd. And it was March 16th when I’d gotten pizza there with Charlie. Is it already time to think about her? Will I be able to fall asleep once I finish hashing it all out, yet again? It must be late. Well-past one-eighteen a.m.
Let’s just re-orient ourselves before getting into all of that. I’ve done a lot of thinking so far. My pillow feels like it doesn’t fit and there’s a loud bird and it seems like there’s light outside even though there isn’t and all of this because it’s after one-eighteen a.m. I have no idea what time it is – my thoughts don’t come at a measurable pace. I know I’m going to the early service. No reason re-calculating the morning routine; I just know I need to be up by seven. The street should be a real dishwasher. Charlie always liked it that way (here we go, on to Charlie). She used to point out the busy-ness of the streets. By the time we’d walked to the end of the block – we walked holding hands; I can remember the warm pressure of it – she’d have catalogued aloud only half of the things she’d observed. Out of breath, she would turn around and shout back down the street, “It’s too much!” then start to laugh and put her forehead on my shoulder so that I could rest my chin in her blonde curls and smell the herb oil she put in her hair. It was on one of those days that I came up with my dishwasher metaphor. She looked at me from my shoulder with wide eyes: “What?” I explained myself and she sighed, content, I think. Full of love, I think. I knew those days that we were in love. It was a question only taken into consideration much later, or it seemed much later. It was only a few weeks after that day, actually. “Are we really in love?”
I have to turn over, to toss and turn… and slap my pillow… I don’t like this part of the story but I approach it so quickly; I wish I could pad the front more. Weren’t there more memories from before? But they’re all dwarfed by that bruising uproar that comes later. Why should I look at the clock now? One-eighteen a.m. Maybe if I unplug it… Where’s the plug? Fuck.
What was she saying over pizza? I’m pretty sure I’ll never get the words right. That we – she spoke as if she were talking generally about humans; of course the implication that “we” was her and me was clear, despite the abstraction – tend to convince ourselves that our feelings are something we want them to be. That we (she’s a writer) irresponsibly take more seriously what is told than what is shown. And that this was an unhealthy burden, that there was a dissonance when she said things like “I love you” and then wasn’t sure she meant it. I remember agreeing with her. But more vividly I remember her brilliantly brown eyes and that I couldn’t stop myself from smiling when I looked at them which certainly made me appear to be a sociopath since I was smiling while she was busy breaking up with me.
No, that’s not the best way to frame things. I never landed on the best way to frame things there, at that point of the story. Let’s put it this way: she knew what was making me smile, because she’d commented, before, on my dopey smiles, and what she thought they were telling her, and my smiling in that moment wasn’t making things easy for her. It’s a curious thing… Yeah, I think this is right: I think that my smiling was a defense mechanism, a late attempt to reverse her retreat.
It was a real surprise to see that ad in the paper. An ad that was way past its prime advertising the pizza place where Charlie and I had last talked, where I had my last fill of her presence. What did I say the date on that paper was? August 3rd? That doesn’t make sense – that’s today. It isn’t today’s paper. Or rather yesterday. So I was wrong about the date. Could I have saved the paper, having seen the ad, having been reminded of these events, and felt the need to pocket some of my misery in that physical memento?
I left the pizza place, having had another slice after Charlie left, with a sense that I’d really botched the job and I still don’t know what to do with that besides tuck that feeling away and hope I never uncover it again accidentally while shifting things around in my mind.
So this is why I want to go to church (I’ve really done a good job with this story, haven’t I? I rehearse it every night that I can’t sleep, always bringing it full-circle. Of course some details don’t make sense, for example tomorrow is Thursday and there’s no church service, but that always happens in a re-telling: there’s some slippage in time).
* * * * *
Will the alarm work tomorrow even though the clock isn’t moving? It doesn’t matter, I probably won’t be going to church. There’s Charlie, I can hear her coming up the stairs, softly pressing each step into the wood so she doesn’t wake me. Maybe when she gets in bed I will turn over and tell her how much I love her, but I think this will bother her because she probably just wants to sleep. She wants to get in bed with me while I’m asleep and pass the time, but I can’t give this to her because I can’t sleep.
I’ll explain myself, bluntly, before she comes in and I try to quiet my thoughts, try not to think so loudly that she can hear me doing it, because I think that is a real phenomenon: I think people can hear you if you think loudly enough. Not psychically, they can’t hear words, but their human senses – temperature, smell, listening to breathing, seeing body language – some combination of instinct calculations leads people to the understanding that this person is thinking quite loudly.
Charlie and I have not broken up. We are still making a life together and things are going well as far as I can tell. I’m not sure what purpose this fantasy addresses, the fantasy (and I don’t mean fantasy as in something fantastic and optimistic and wonderful, I just mean counterfactual supposition) that Charlie dumps me at a pizza place and I take it so hard that I replay the circumstances every night and sweat and can’t sleep and have to make the manic decision to request help from god. I am preparing myself for the end of our happiness, though it isn’t in sight. And/or, I am measuring my love for Charlie by imagining my reaction to loss. And/or drinking from the bitter waters of tumult, for which you can develop a taste when the days have been a nonstop current of viscous sweetness.
There was something else I wanted to add. I need to think for a moment… I only just realized how much I am sweating. My shirt is sticking to the sheets. It isn’t so hot, either… I actually just shivered. I only wanted to guess at the time, but my thoughts don’t move at a measurable pace. I already said that, didn’t I?
Wasn’t that her coming up the stairs? Where’s Charlie?
* * * * *
The pastor of my childhood is named Frank. I liked him. I remember him on the steps after every service. He would take my hand in both of his and press warmly with them. They were large, puffy, well-worn. I don’t think I looked him in the eyes much, when he said thank you for coming, have a blessed day, but now when I think of the memory I zoom out like a camera on a rope, whatever those cinema devices are called, and I can see Frank looking down at me, bending his back to speak to me. I think I was dismissive, afraid to meet his eyes with a smile, because I couldn’t make one up to be equal to his own.
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