by Steve Himmer
They seem to be quiet enough. So far they seem to be sleeping. But I don’t know why they’ve come here or how long they might stay or if they know someone lives in this cave near their camp and that the someone is me. They must have noticed my garden beside them, even setting up camp in the dark. Surely they spotted the glow of my fire last night, though they didn’t light one themselves that I saw, but my vision is much worse at night—if I’m by the fire, I can’t see anything outside its glow. And to think, I eat far more carrots now than I ever did in my other life. Another bit of old wisdom disproved.
So there are these hikers, and there is their tent, and what do I do with them now? If I’ve learned anything at all from the river it’s to let jarring events come and go, that such tiny disruptions have no more weight in the world than fallen leaves on the water. A few ripples, a barely audible splash, and the surface soon returns to order. To swim toward each intrusion, to fish out a leaf and to sling it ashore, only prolongs the disturbance.
So I made my naked way out of the cave as I do every morning, aware for once of how naked I was, aware because whether or not they were looking, there was for once someone nearby to notice what my furred, feathered, and finned but never dressed neighbors don’t mind. I was aware but I wasn’t bothered, because this is my garden and these are my woods and this is my own naked life. To change my routine because of these hikers, because of their tent burning bright by my bushes, would reject what I’ve learned from the river. To give up the gains of the many years cascading in the white whiskerfall of my beard. And breaking my usual practice hadn’t worked out very well the morning before, so why invite lightning to strike me again?
After porridge for breakfast and dawn meditation on top of my cave, my feet carried me on familiar steps toward the river—even with my eyes closed, even blind, the thick, filthy soles of my feet could feel the strip of grass and packed earth worn thin in a stripe from my door to the water—and past their camp in no hurry at all, as if they weren’t there, as if their tent weren’t outshining the sleepy-eyed sun. I stopped as I often do for a handful of berries, so close to the zippered door of their shelter that had they emerged at that moment, they could have caught a handful of my own berries. But no face or fist appeared through the zipper and I carried on toward the water, down the hill past the hum of my hives. The drone of the bees is a portal I pass through each morning, wiping my mind clean for meditation, and once on the river I went about my routine as if those slumbering hikers weren’t there. I did what I do every day, what I’ve done every day for every one of my days that has mattered.
But I would be lying if I denied to myself and to the Old Man that those hikers have rattled my leaves like the strong winds of that storm. They’ve blown down upon me like the branch I found crushing the stubby greens of my potatoes. Should I have known that storm blew an ill wind? Should I have worried and wondered that trouble was aglide on its gusts?
Who’s to say one has to do with the other? Who’s to know why those hikers are here any more than why the storm was?
The Old Man has asked me to meditate on their presence, and I’m not surprised he has. Not so much that he wants me to wonder why they are here—though I will—but to think about my response and what it should be. It’s been a long time since any strangers passed by and none ever stayed for the night, so already they’ve brought me disruption. They’ve called up the concrete world I left behind and deposited old memories on my idle tongue, but as ever there’s no one to tell. They’ve made me wonder for the first time in forever how long I’ve lived here, how much time has passed, about the world that isn’t my garden—not that I’m planning to visit, not that I’ll go anywhere, but apart from the seagulls whose legs are sometimes plastered with soggy scraps of unreadable news, little word comes my way from that world. And now here they are, a man and a woman, and their arrival makes me remember my own after so long spent living as if I have always been here, like I was born in this garden as what I’ve become. They’ve reminded me how all this began with losing my job: the garden, the cave, my swims in the river and years spent in silence, all stemming from that unspoken meeting with the submanager.
They’ve already disrupted my day before they’re even awake. They’ve already intruded upon my routine. But I was welcomed into this garden, I was given what I needed here when I needed it, so it’s no easy question what kind of host I should be. If the answer is somewhere, if it’s for me to find, it’s in how I came to be here myself, so that’s what I’ll spend today’s hours on the river thinking about, adrift on my back and backward in time, led by the faithful scribe in my mind through the archives of my own story.
5
Before getting fired I’d never measured how much empty time makes a day. I’d spent years writing blogs on the company’s dime, leading dozens of made-up lives with their own careers and diseases and hobbies, and all those voices I had to keep speaking carried me through each eight hours of work and through five days of the week in which enough tasks and chores piled up at home to last me the weekend. And now, with seven of seven days free? Without those extra lives to occupy mine and at home every day to keep up with the house? I’d always worked at one job or another and though I’d never enjoyed it, that’s what I knew. As often as I might have imagined winning the lotto and quitting my job, now that I’d come closer than ever all that shapeless, idealized freedom had lost its appeal.
Working at Second Nature had been boring and I didn’t do very much while I was there, but I knew what I was meant to be doing whether I did it or not. I’d had a title and a boxful of cards to confirm it. I’d known exactly how much time I had in each day for projects other than those I was paid for, and I could rely on not being bothered for as long as I sat at my desk. Now, with no desk to sit at and all the time in the world to myself, I was overwhelmed by my options—who could I steal time from now?
I spent days and then weeks sprawled on the couch or on the white carpet floor of my white living room, following the stuccoed swirls of the ceiling around and around with my eyes until its pale blur assembled into a daydream. The tie I’d pulled off upon coming home that last day coiled on the floor between coffee table and sofa, and I imagined it rising snakelike to dance on its tail, or trailing into the air like a long, slender ribbon or one of those prayer flags I’d seen on TV.
I stopped wearing shoes and I let my beard grow and was shocked at the white it contained. I’d never gone more than a few days without shaving, and didn’t expect the pale stripe that emerged like a ski slope on a forested mountain. (And if it was a snowy stripe then, it’s a whole frozen forest years later, hanging like a bib to my belly.) In the dormant screen of the TV set, with the living room lights out around me, my reflection was reduced to only that stripe and if I moved my head back and forth I was smoke passing against the night sky of the screen. My hair grew shaggy and the more time I spent on the couch and the longer I went without washing, the more pronounced and persistent my bed-head became. I looked like I’d been caught in three or four gusts of wind blowing in different directions at once.
I watched animal shows with the sound turned up loud but the brightness down low, and I pretended my couch was in a faraway jungle as some baritone narrator described my place in the world. I hadn’t watched those shows very often before, and I’d never spent much time outside except walking from the front door to my car or across parking lots, and I discovered that the world of lions and zebras, of penguins and baobab trees and deadly piranhas, was more exciting than I’d ever known. I wondered if I’d missed the boat on nature, and if it was too late to do something about it.
As time passed and I went without washing, without changing out of the foul shorts and T-shirt I’d had on forever, I started to stink. Then I went beyond stinking to something new, a sharp tang I’d never imagined my own body could produce. It was almost an accomplishment, I almost felt proud, like my commitment to inertia was announcing itself through my pores. And I thought I smelled a lit
tle bit wild, like the jungles I was listening to on TV would have smelled if broadcast technology were more advanced. If TV was real life.
I daydreamed without interruption from the ping of incoming email, and spent unbroken hours following unguided thoughts through my head. My bills were all paid by automatic withdrawal, so I had no idea how much money was going out or how much had come in as my severance pay from Second Nature. I ate when the idea of a meal crossed my mind but I never shopped for more food. Soon there were only forgotten canned goods at the back of the pantry and a refrigerator door full of condiments orphaned there over the years. One night it was creamed corn with instant gravy, the next cranberry sauce with parmesan-flavored flakes. I was driven to eat by curiosity as much as by hunger, wondering how one thing might taste with another. When I finally exhausted the two jars of bacon bits I couldn’t recall ever buying, I was disappointed because they went so well with everything, and that disappointment was the first genuine, recognizable feeling I’d had in a while.
When I had been working I wished for free time and daydreamed of how I might spend it. Traveling abroad or wandering the streets of my city, learning to paint or to sail or to decorate cakes. Now, with nothing but time on my hands, I didn’t know where to start and it was simpler to not start at all. I had no more interest in finding a job than I had in anything else, and the couch molded itself to my body as my mind molded itself to the comfortable weight of all that free time.
When the landlord began to leave messages, I knew my money was gone or at least that the rent had stopped being withdrawn from my bank account. The phone company called, and the electric company, too, but I never answered; I let all their warnings and threats spew into the room from my answering machine’s tiny speaker. It was only a matter of time, I realized, until the lights and the TV went dark and until the landlord came knocking. I should have done something about it, but I preferred not to. I watched and I waited in part because I didn’t know what exactly to do, how to respond apart from getting a job to get some more money to get the bills paid, but I also waited because I was curious what really happened to someone who stopped paying rent. Would my utilities actually be turned off, and after how long? I’d seen these kinds of things on TV but never in my own life; I took the consequences of being a deadbeat on faith, just like the existence of snowballs and blue whales and other things I’d never seen, and the surface of the moon not being green cheese, and because of that faith I’d always paid my bills and my rent and invested for my retirement like everyone else. But now that I was up against it, against eviction and severed phone service, it wasn’t as scary as I’d thought it would be. After weeks on the couch doing nothing, it was even exciting to worry if the landlord’s appearance would break up the routine of my days.
And he did come, I think, in the dark while I tried to remember the myriad ways in which the swirled ceiling caught light and shadows when there were light and shadows to catch. When I had first moved into my unit in the apartment complex, I was annoyed by those bland textured whorls and longed for smooth plaster, only to discover their vast complications when I gave them the time they deserved.
There was a knock at the door, and another, the scraping and clanking of keys but none sliding into the lock. I heard a guttural curse, then heavy battering both high and low, like someone punching and kicking the wood. The door rattled and the front window shook but I didn’t get up. If they were coming in, they were coming; what difference would it make if I stayed on the floor or sat on the couch or opened the door to greet them? Then the noise stopped and the quiet came back. I returned to recalling my ceiling by daylight, then daylight returned and my ceiling became its old self again and I tried to remember where night’s shadows had fallen across it, and eventually I fell asleep.
Days and nights I wandered the web, reading a few words on this site and a few words on that, and watching videos I forgot as soon as they ended. I found that I missed getting email—not reading emails, not the requests they made or the work they demanded, and not the jarring sound of their arrival, but the simple pleasure of a new message arriving and the promise-filled moment before it was read. The only email address I’d ever had was for work, so I made myself an account with a free online service and I signed up for mailing lists and listservs and weekly coupons and anything else I could find that promised to fill my inbox. I spent hours with the computer as warm as a cat in my lap; I watched movies and infomercials and all the nature shows I could find, and I read every email that came. I read the spam, about growing my penis and firing my boss and saving Nigerian princes; offers of drugs just approved for the market and invitations to test those that weren’t; genuine college diplomas and ads for DVDs that would teach me how to quickly get rich selling get-rich-quick DVDs. I read all of it. I looked for patterns and secrets and codes. I read between the lines, I looked beneath the strategic typos and awkward word choices for signs of human intention—I tried to locate the person behind the machine that randomly assembled those texts, the personality behind the promotion. Sometimes they seemed to be written for me, when the arbitrary, half-sensical subjects referred to events in my life or came from names I recognized, and I wrote back as if we were friends. I told Nigerian princes to hang in there, their family’s fortune would be safe soon, I was sure; they could trust me, I had a good feeling for them. I told lonely, horny young women their princes would come in due time, perhaps from Nigeria, and I gave them each other’s email addresses to help the connections occur. I wrote quick notes and long letters, but none of my correspondents ever replied. Until one night who knows how many weeks into unemployment and how many hours away from eviction, an email arrived in the deep part of morning, an email sent out to the whole nocturnal world but aimed directly at me:
Are you a quiet, contemplative nature enthusiast available for full-time employment? This is the opportunity you have been waiting for and thought would never arrive. We offer a competitive salary and excellent benefits, including all lodging and meals. Daydreamers and introverts encouraged to apply. May we assume you are interested?
So I replied only with “Yes,” a single-word email cast into the night like a desperate bottle tossed asea from an island, with just as much hope of reply. And then I read some more spam and wrote to more princes and fell asleep as the dust-crusted blinds of my dreary apartment began to glow orange again.
6
I was woken by more banging against the front door; I didn’t know if I’d been sleeping a few minutes or hours because I was pulled from my dreams so violently that I remained disoriented and groggy, on my back on the couch, one arm still asleep where it hung off the side and a crusted drool trail tightening my cheek, dried midstream on its way toward the floor.
The landlord, I thought, had returned to evict me, his thick-armed thugs brought along to drag me out—though where I came up with them I don’t know, because I’d never actually met my landlord, the actual owner of the vast hive of apartments I lived in, identical to other hives in other parts of the city. I’d only ever dealt with the constantly rotating staff in the management office, and none of them were thick-armed thugs. Mostly they were bored college graduates waiting for a better job to turn up, though whether they left the complex management office because they found those better jobs or because they couldn’t bear to stay any longer, who knows.
I rolled from the couch to the floor, with the coffee table between my body and the front windows, where I might not be seen right away if the landlord let himself in. The banging went on and went on, rhythmic and metered, firm but not angry. It went on longer than I’d expect a landlord to wait before using his key or his thugs to open the door. Then it stopped.
I waited, still flat on the floor between table and couch, then I lifted my head to look for a shadow behind the blinds, but there wasn’t one. I waited a moment longer then stood, crept on bare feet to the door and peeped through the peephole to find not the landlord, not his thugs, but a tall, ropy chauffeur standing outs
ide, a few steps back from the door and staring straight into the hole at my eye. I’d never seen a chauffeur before, a real one, but he fit the role so perfectly I could tell right away what he was. He looked like every professional driver I’d seen in a movie or on TV. From the gray suit, peaked cap, and suede driving gloves, I got the idea he was an ex-race-car driver and also, conveniently for his employer, a former champion boxer, the kind of driver you’d want waiting outside in case your meeting took a bad turn, if you were in the sort of business that might involve that kind of meeting. He tipped his hat and nodded toward the peephole, the slimmest smile on his lips, so what could I do but open the door? He already knew I was there.
As soon as the door opened, as soon as fresh air blew into the room, I nearly gagged on the scent of myself. I hadn’t minded when there was nothing to contrast my smell with, but now in that fresh air I knew I was rank. I wasn’t the wildness of the jungle so much as I was its damp rot. But the chauffeur was too professional, too good at his job, to react to the smell. And I was impressed.
“Good morning, Mr. Finch,” he said. “I believe you answered an email from my employer. He would like to discuss the position, so if you’ll please step into the car.”
The car was a gleaming silver limousine—a Rolls Royce, maybe, but I don’t know cars—so long it stretched from my door all the way to the far end of the building, past the neighboring unit. So what could I say? Whatever the job, whether or not I decided to take it, at least I’d get a ride in this car. That wouldn’t ever happen again, not to a person like me. And, not quite awake after not enough sleep and not eating well for a while, maybe I was more conducive to direction than I might have been under other conditions. I’ve heard that can happen, with religious cults doing brainwashing and that sort of thing.
