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By Root 629 0

in front of me who, from behind, was the spitting image of my mother—the same hair colour and cut, and she held herself the way my mother did, her whole body bent in an arc. And she was wearing yellow ochre, my mother’s favourite colour. I had no idea a simple colour could mean so much. Anyway, for the first thirty seconds I was looking at this woman from behind, I didn’t make the connection that it wasn’t my mother or that my mother was dead. I felt as if I were a teenager again, and I’d bumped into her there in the bank, and the moment she turned around and saw me I was going to catch shit for something I’d done wrong. But then the woman moved, and it wasn’t my mother, and I felt socked on the jaw. My body felt all boneless and my eyes teared up, and then I got mad because the last thing I want in my life right now is more grief or memories. I’m sick of everything leaving my life, and nothing new ever coming my way.

What keeps me going right now, DeeDee, is the notion that, stripped of any form of protective coating—of stupidity, of youth, of ignorance, of money—of anything that might allow me to delude myself, I still manage to hang in there and go to that wretched Staples and stack the reams of twenty-pound bond paper and direct customers to the Maxwell House coffee promotional kiosk. It’s a wonder I don’t arrive one morning and drive through the front windows in my car, taking out as many people as I can in one grand, glorious gesture.

Strike that. I’m not a psycho. If anything, I’ll probably drink too many vodka Breezers and get mellow out by the back door, where the girls take their smoke breaks. Guys don’t smoke any more. Notice that?

It’s fun when I’m buzzed and throwing tennis balls to my dog, Wayne. The girls get such a kick out of it, and for a ten-minute window they can think of me as a real person.

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.

Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns.

Imagine growing younger instead of older.

Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

Break time is over. I’m training to work as an aisle associate in the Personal Digital Assistant aisle. That’s “PDA” in our high-tech world here.

Roger

Roger

DeeDee,

I thought over the letter I sent two days ago and realized it was a depressing pile of crap and you need something like that like you need a hole in the head. So I’m sending you these daisies—at least, that’s what the picture on the screen showed. I was going to throw in a little silver Mylar balloon with “Sorry” printed on it, but that might make you retch. I promise not to write such a depressing letter again.

Roger

Roger

To Bethany

c/o YHA London—Hampstead Heath Hostel

4 Wellgarth Road

London, England

VIA your secret FedEx number

Bethany . . . first things first: write your mother, okay? She’s going nuts worrying about you. Enough said.

Next: I’m glad you told me you visited Joan. The last while has been kind of rough and, yeah, I’m having trouble these days, but Joan isn’t what you’d call a fountain of sympathy. I can make up all the excuses I want, but the fact is, I merely lie in my bed in the morning and don’t get out. Especially at this time of year. I ask you, why do we even bother having wakefulness? Dreams are way more interesting than real life, and in dreams you never have to get out of bed. For that matter, why does life bother going forward? No matter what organism you look at . . . an amoeba or an elk or whatever, it does everything it can to advance itself—it tries to not be killed, it tries to mate, it tries to not be eaten. What’s the nature of this divine computer program that drives everything to go forward? Why doesn’t DNA sometimes say to itself, “You know what? I’m tired of this survival shit. I think I’m going to pack it in. It ends here.”

Guess who had to put up the Christmas displays this year? You guessed it.