The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney
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the years go on, the dreams (Are memories really dreams, if they do not concoct things that have not happened?) seem to bleed of certain colors and retain in them the more structural elements: the swerving search for Wesley, never realized in the first breach of gas in its benign entry, not understood; the horizon of dead and dying, infinitely—yes, that, the faces and bodies in their dour uniformity, woolen forms bogged in their muck, cries of anguish, the sense in it all that the air has gone from the world.
And then, in old age, the reckoning. The burying of the dead, all of them, fields of them, the burying of the sense that this moment is ever resolvable—ever, possibly, somehow—by its nightly screening in his mind’s recesses. Somewhere out here at the end of the line, they begin to recede, as if time has run out on all of them but him.
12. The outcome of situations that can only be planned to a certain extent
After Martha’s funeral, he writes letters North to explain what has happened, and receives letters back that console and outrage him: For the best; Not a surprise; Gone to a better place . . . No one has come down but, on the other hand, no one was invited, none of these people grown so distant from him and Martha in the tightly circumvallated world. They cannot understand how he depended on her, even as he spooned food into her drooping mouth and carried her to the bathtub, her shrunken gossamer body. You must be relieved . . . It must have been a burden . . .
In the weeks after Martha has gone, Percy can only feel the sting of the fact, the moment: that their whole plan, the entire map of how it would be, has proven false. Him, standing over freshly turned soil, over the wife who would doubtlessly live on. Him, standing in the brilliant sunshine as his Martha settles into her darkness. Him, impossibly like this.
13. Some faint relief as provided by the carefully circumscribed art of the square dance
He hears someone coming out to get him. Staff tends to keep a wary eye, but what he hears is a man’s harrumphing breaths, behind him. None other than Cap’n Irv.
“Bub . . . So you didn’t die, then,” Cap’n Irv says.
“Close, though,” Percy whispers.
“Really? I was only joking.”
“Oh.”
“Well, don’t worry, Mrs. Gottlieb will be okay.”
“What happened to her?”
“You put her on the floor, Percy.”
“Oh, good God.”
“Staff checked her. She’s fine. She landed softly. Those hips of hers.”
“How horribly embarrassing, really though.”
Cap’n Irv comes around to stand face-to-face with Percy, even though they are both in the dark.
“I didn’t ever insult you, did I?”
“No, not at all.”
“You should come by sometime,” he says. “I’ll mix you a drink. You can entertain the ladies.”
“I’ve made a complete fool of myself.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. I think all in all, it went well. One small moment, is all. You’ve been in a war, what the hell’s anything else?”
Percy thinks about this. “Can’t really believe I got this far.”
“You and me both.”
They stand there nodding their whitened heads in the sultry darkness.
“Mrs. Gottlieb is owed restitution,” Cap’n Irv says, and not without a lascivious air.
14. The one moment of all that must always remain most considered
He goes slower now, slower even than the slow swirl of a bunch of elderly square-dancing Floridians, slower than the record allows. A couple of dozen people, letting the music get ahead of them, no one mentioning that they are all simply waiting up for a man whose lungs betray him, always. Mrs. Gottlieb swings on his arm, smiling, unruffled by the past, the near past, or the rest of the past.
Strangers, all of them, a world of strangers that spread outside his door. But the touch of them is real, and they huff and wheeze as he does, and he somehow, miraculously, feels light on his feet, and carried along, on and on.
Street View
The original word, I might point out, was Googol. I remember that distinctly from my favorite childhood book. The Answer Book. By Mary Elting, and if not that, surely its sequel, Answers and More Answers. I Googled the book a while back to see which; sadly, both books seem lost to prehistory, defined here as prior to 1990. But the lack of the internet in my youth covers my tracks, even as it now works to haunt me.
The Answer Book was like a paper version of Google, if Google were limited to three hundred questions you didn’t get to choose but were assured that “children asked most.” How is glass made? What happened to the dinosaurs? What makes a rocket go?
When you finished that book there was a sense of completeness, but also the sense of all that was out there beyond one’s view. What would the 301st question have been? In my rural childhood, when I closed that book, all that was left was the long expanses of sorghum that stretched out to the hot sky’s edges.
“Googol” was the largest named numeral. A numeral one, followed by one hundred zeroes. Numbers like that seemed stupendous back then, but now barely make a dent. I feel a life in which, as I age, I have multiples of personas. The flow of information is overwhelming, and I found that the night I began to Google my possibly sad journey here. But circa 1970, The Answer Book was all I had, a meager meal in the end, staving off a ravenous appetite. The irony I find now is that for my own students, for whom facts and information lie boundlessly before them, they seem not to want to open the covers.
I grew up in Arkansas. The other night, I sat in my study in Cambridge and typed in the address of that first house, a faded bungalow shouldered onto Highway 65; on the screen of my laptop, rising like a fever dream from Google Street View, there it was. That shoebox of my misery. I could see them all, instantly: my mother, dropped ankles and rubbery skin, fretting on that low porch; my grandmother, wheezing in her housecoat; my father, shirtless, the billow of stink off his breath.
I worry that Street View might defeat my memory; I click the digital chevrons at the bottom of the screen, and the picture slides, and I am again gliding by that squat house, collapsing of its own humid cladding. I’m gliding as I did on that secondhand bike, spray-painted red, the underinflated tires thumping on the hot ribbon of Route 65—what my father called “The Road to Damascus,” although the flow of northbound traffic indicated it was mostly “from.” I don’t remember sweating, but I must have, all the time, in that heat. I was ten.
Sometimes, then, I don’t know how I got here. I rarely speak of who I once was, here in the rarified life. I am married to a woman who sits me down for a “serious talk” and says such things as, “I feel I need to be living a more textured existence.” She cannot imagine the serious talks at that kitchen table in the house on Route 65, as poverty and alcoholism and despair closed in on my people. Then she looks at me looking at her, and accuses me of not understanding.
I wear all the right clothes now. The Oxford shirts and buttery loafers, the pressed chinos. After dinner I drink The Famous Grouse, on the rocks, from a crystal tumbler. I live in just the right place: I sit in my house on a leafy street, brick-sidewalked street (walking distance from the Yard), a street on which birds seemed to have been shipped in to sing their morning tunes.
So different than the machine-thrumming summer buzz of Arkansan grasshoppers. I had a drawl