• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1108 0

back in the closet he reorganized the closet itself, refolding her sweaters and blouses and correctly matching her shoes. He put her papers back in the file cabinet but before returning them he culled every unnecessary page and bill and piece of useless correspondence until the files themselves shrank to half the width they’d been before. He gathered all of the detritus from their bedside tables, separating the dead pens from those that could still write and throwing out the others, separating out the pennies and nickels and quarters and dimes each into their own bottles. He threw out old phone books. He tore scribbled pages from legal pads until he arrived at sheets blank but for the indentations of what had been written on them before. In short, he purged their apartment of their lives’ clutter, and it felt roomier, shipshape, arranged. He even crammed the stuffing back into the mattress and sewed the torn gash closed. And before he put the mattress back on the box spring, he returned Alice’s journal to where he’d found it, knowing he’d sleep better with it there.

He had a look at himself in the mirror. He looked like a newborn. His shaved skin felt unbelievably soft.

Then he sat down at the table with his manuscript and began to write. Immediately he got beyond the place where he’d been blocked and into whole new territories, with a speed of which he’d only dreamed. He wrote for so long that his eyes and fingers hurt, so automatically it was as if another voice spoke through him, and when exhausted after many hours of this he rested his bald head on the table.

Days passed. Weeks. He fell into a routine. He woke up and put on the coffee and showered while it was brewing. He was always sure to have everything on the dining table arranged the night before—manuscript, pens, notepad, laptop. He ate something light before starting, maybe an egg or some fruit or toast with cheese, then wrote for several hours, three or four, usually, the freshest of the day, though he could go as long as five—the iteration a blink, a devolution or evolution to an animal’s sense of time, which is to say he had no sense of it at all. He was given to reading aloud, to shouting his words without inflection to feel the pressure and hear the meter of his sentences. Or he spoke sometimes as he wrote, quietly. He ate again, standing at the kitchen counter more often than not. He went for a walk in the park afterward but didn’t see a thing. He made a new pot of coffee, though he wasn’t beyond reheating what was left in the carafe. The second session could be wonderful, a gift. Mental exhaustion could free him up, bring him closer to dreaming, or it could be a complete wash, setting the hair he didn’t have aflame. By the end of the day he was ready for a run. He changed, went to the park again, ran round the cinder track and back. Blood speeding through his veins, flooding his brain, could be hallucinogenic, triggering an associative storm. He made notes as soon as he returned, then did push-ups and sit-ups. He bought himself a pull-up bar, adding an extra rep or two a day. He grew stronger, thinner, leaner, his carb face disappearing, though in the mirror it wasn’t him he saw. Alice was right: the skin could be a chrysalis; underneath was someone new. He showered, changed, poured himself some wine, drinking while he made dinner, though it was an act of will to cook for one. Having given everything to the day, he was now spent, utterly, on night’s shore, in bliss shelled in by regret. And the next day he started over.

Once, in the hallway, he stopped before his favorite Escher, Encounter, the picture in which the little men—one black, the other white—come around from the background, from a conjoined, two-dimensional tessellation, to meet as separate entities in the foreground above the surface of the plane. He saw his reflection in the glass, and when he focused on it the picture disappeared; and then it returned to view.

It was all becoming clearer now.

• • •

Weeks passed this way, his solitude uninterrupted, summer having arrived, June now, and