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By Root 2306 0

some sort of official business relating to my outburst at the art gallery, the particular implications of which I could not even begin to guess at. Our phone was in the kitchen. It was plastic and pale green, bolted to the wall at about (human) chest level, right beside the refrigerator, and the receiver was connected to the port by a long drooping plastic cord that coiled like a pig’s tail. When someone on the outside wanted to speak to Lydia, the phone would sound its alarm, which sounded like the gobbling of an electric turkey, and she would pad into the kitchen, her bare feet sticking to the floor, to pick up the receiver, and then would spend a long time—sometimes up to an hour or more—either speaking into it or listening to the inscrutably faint crunching noises that issued from it. I would watch her listening to or talking on the phone. We lived an almost entirely interior existence at this time—it was too cold to make going out any fun, and apparently there was nowhere we had to go, anyway—and Lydia, her poor brain dunked in headaches like a lobster in a boiling pot, would often go the whole day without changing out of the clothes she’d slept in, which often meant just a thin T-shirt and panties, and when she listened to the phone, sometimes she would unconsciously, very, very slowly, pace around in a small circle on the kitchen floor, and the long pale green plastic cord would wind itself around her body, around her pale bare legs—and then she would look down and realize what she had done, and reverse the direction of the small circles she was pacing, from counterclockwise to clockwise or vice versa, and the cord gradually unraveled around her, to hang loose and slack again between the phone port and her long, beautiful body.

Usually these conversations appeared benign enough, although she almost always hung the receiver in its peg in a more agitated state than she had picked it up in. Occasionally her voice would approach a pitch and tone that sounded angry, or outright hostile. I could gauge how pleasant the conversation had been based on the level of violence with which she slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

Other times she would say she had to go on an errand but that whatever she had to do was a complicated bit of business, for which she could not take me along. Such instances were irritating and unnerving, since for nearly a year I had barely been out of Lydia’s sight for more than an hour or two. And on these rare occasions she would suit up for the outside without me, then gather all her artifacts together—keys, briefcase, purse, sometimes a coffee cup—kiss me good-bye—once, chastely, on the forehead—nervous, preoccupied—wave, and exit through the front door. With my long purple fingers I inched the window curtains apart to watch Lydia enter her car, start the engine, check the rearview mirror and fasten her seat belt (always the cautious driver) as she edged out of her parking place and into the slush and sluggish traffic of the city streets. When Lydia left the house it hardly mattered where she was going—it mattered simply and only that she was gone. She had disappeared into another universe and would reappear in this one at another time. She was gone from my world, temporarily missing from my sphere of existence. When she was gone I would watch cartoons on TV, sometimes while furtively licking a battery, or I would paint in my studio, or else go upstairs to knock on Mr. Morgan’s door to see if he wanted to play backgammon, or let me listen to him practicing the bagpipes. After several weeks of this behavior—the phone calls, the mysterious errands—Lydia announced to me what were the apparent fruits of all her clandestine labors: we were moving.

Moving? I wondered. What did she mean, moving? I spent most of the day moving in some way, didn’t I? Moving what? Moving how? Moving where?

“We’re moving to Colorado,” said Lydia.

I did not even know what Colorado meant, what it was. Was it a place, or was it more like a state of mind or being? If it was a place, then was it also contained in Chicago?