Horace Afoot

by Frederick Reuss

  Or what about you, Horace? You, who departed this life like a diner replete from a banquet, rubbing your stomach and picking your teeth? Do it!

  Do it!

  C’mon! Whoever you are! Pull the trigger!

  …

  …

  I can’t.

  He can’t.

  We can’t.

  It can’t. The brain. It refuses to extinguish itself. Doesn’t trust itself. Saved—for all its higher faculties and lowly instincts—to survive its own harsh acuity.

  I drink. More dullness seeps in at the edges. It is comforting. Look up at the sky. Good-bye, Sylvia Plath. Good-bye and good riddance. Goodbye and thanks for fixing my ordo amoris, setting it straight in line with all the other objectively existing orders of things that may or may not be perceived or understood and that may or may not be doubted but that (drinks sloshing in our hands) we may repair to for comfort and, if we’re lucky, a little peace of mind.

  I finish the bottle and throw it against the fence. It breaks with a loud crash. Try to stand up, drunk now, exceedingly drunk, and feel in the grass for the last bottle. Let’s go visit Mohr. Read him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Now, there’s a story.

  The house is dark when I arrive. It is long past midnight, judging by the moon. The walk has sobered me. I knock on the front door and wait, then rap on the office window, but nobody answers. I sit on one of the wicker chairs on the porch, legs heavy with wine and walking. The sound of canned television laughter filters through an open window above. It is humid. Warm and humid. The open expanse of lawn surrounding the house creates a feeling of exposure, like being cut on a broad starlit prairie and having no place to hide. Welcome, the sign on the road says.

  I get up and knock again, this time more aggressively. Then, after a few more minutes of waiting, return to the chair. A breeze picks up and blows across the porch, on it the smell of approaching rain. I settle into the chair and unfurl my legs, taunt myself for flirting with the gun and for bringing it to tempt Mohr. Will he understand the gesture or be offended by the melodrama of it? He must have decided against suicide long ago—preferring instead to come alone to this creaky old house and stiffen slowly in a rented room.

  But maybe not …

  I walk around to the back of the house, looking for Mohr’s window. The monotony of the landscape makes it difficult to reconstruct the view from it. The house is large, and there are several windows to choose from, all facing southwest—so the tenants can warm themselves, I imagine, and count sunsets. I put the bottle down and rap gently on the third window from the corner. Rap again, then push up. The window opens easily. 262 curtains billow. It is Mohr’s room. The smell gives it away. I drop the bottle in the window. It lands on the floor with a loud thud.

  “It’s me,” I call, listen for a reply, then hoist myself up through the frame, gun jabbing into my pelvis as I belly through, walking on hands, and drop onto the floor at the foot of the bed.

  The room is still. I get up slowly. “Are you here?” The room is dark but for a weak cone of moonlight stabbing through the parted curtains. Eyes slow to adjust to the dark, I lean toward the tumbled sheets and pillows. “Are you there?”

  No answer.

  I fumble with the bedside lamp, twist it on with a noisy clack. His head is sunk among the pillows, mouth agape, eyes open. The tubes are gone from his nose, lie coiled on the floor beside the bed where he must have dropped them. The shocked look of him—as though suddenly extinguished—drives me away. I back off, feeling that I have intruded upon something I have no right to intrude upon, pace to the farthest corner of the room to take in the entire deathbed scene. I am unsure how to react. I have never seen a body so still, so absolutely still. After a few moments I return to the side of the bed to close his eyes. But I recoil from touching him, feeling that this too is some sort of violation. Then I realize that it is right that I, his friend, should be the one to close his eyes. An instinct for rite wells up and, solemnly, I reach out and close his eyes, even letting my fingers linger on the strangely yielding flesh of the lids and the orbs of his eyes underneath them, which also yield to the light pressure of my fingers and retreat deep into their sockets. To close the mouth I push upward on his jaw. The stubble on his chin produces an incongruous scratching sound underneath my fingers. But the lips part and his mouth opens slowly when I remove my hand. I try holding it shut, bent knuckle of my index finger under the chin, thinking that after a minute or two the jaw will lock into this position. But gravity pulls it downward. I pull the pillows out from underneath and his head falls back, chin tilted up at the ceiling. The mouth stays closed.

  I retreat to the other end of the room again, wondering if I should go find the nurse. There is no hurry, I decide, and drag the high-backed leather chair over to the side of the bed, open the bottle of wine by pressing the cork down the neck. I glance around for Treasure Island but can’t see it anywhere. Then intuition tells me where it is, and I pull back the covers. Mohr is holding it Biblelike against his breast. I lift the sheet back over, wondering if he has been holding it since I finished reading it to him or if he reached for it as he was dying—for comfort, or just for something to hold on to.

  The bedside lamp casts a band of light across his gray face. I sit back, lift my feet onto the bed and the bottle to my lips, upending it to let the cork float away from the neck. The wine dribbles into my mouth and courses down my chin. I would like to dribble some wine into Mohr’s mouth too but fear I might not get it closed again.

  A recitation seems in order, and I flit through all the bits of written language stored in my memory for something appropriate, something wise and priestly. But it is not easy. And as I rummage through the detritus and debris of all my reading I begin to feel emptier and more desolate than I can ever remember feeling. I lift the bottle to drink, and it begins to dawn on me that this emptiness is the result and outcome of this mania for storage. And I can think of nothing to say because there is nothing there except the acquired scraps and imparted strands of a tired, epigonic self.

  The muscles of my abdomen begin to tighten and roll, and an anguish I have never felt before breaks over me. I begin to cry. And then, as though a tiny, disengaged part of me is standing off to the side observing (he’s crying now, look at him crying), I give in to the rolling tide, and the room collapses around me so that even the dead Mohr disappears and all that remains is me, alone, me and my own wine-beslobbered reflection into which everything dissolves like a fine powder in a swirling pool of water. Sobs fill the emptiness, fill it with a warm, wet music. People begin to approach from distant places, people I once knew and whom I recognize. My other selves. My eponymous selves. They smile, and I smile back, and they continue smiling, and I am touched by this and overcome by sadness and cry all the harder. I cry to forget them and cry that I have forgotten. I never knew them, and this little poignant piece of the truth makes me sadder, and I cry harder and all the more deliciously for ever having denied it. I love myself and am sad because I don’t know who I am and not knowing who I am is all I will ever know. This cruel little solipsism makes me sadder still, and I cry all the harder for it. These other selves are my only conversation with whatever it is I can call myself, my unknowable self that exists only in conversation—with Chidiock Tichborne (who saw the world and yet who was not seen), with William Blake {who present, past, and future sees), with Quintus Horatius Flaccus (clear in the head—save when nursing a head cold), and now (Oh, the stupidity! Oh, the vainglory!) Lucian of Samosata. They are smiling as if to say everything is all right, that I should get it out of my system, purge myself of my self. And this uncomprehending, curious sympathy makes me cry. And crying makes me cry.

  Then it is over. I am done. The room reassembles itself around me. Former selves clatter back into remoteness. They are gone. The sadness is gone. And I am alone, again face wet with snot and tears and across from me the vitrified body of Mohr the librarian.

  I open the curtains, turn off the light, and
return to the chair. A dim moonlight penetrates the room, and I wipe my face with an edge of the bedsheet, sip from the bottle, and drift into a drowsy contemplation—not of Mohr but of Sylvia and her fate. It is hard to fix her in my thoughts. Soon all that will remain of her is a cruel image of the unfortunate woman fleeing from misogyny to misogyny and looking neither back nor forward but simply stumbling onward through the brutal gauntlet of this world. I struggle to amend the image, to fix her into memory some other way, and now I see her in airports and bus stations, in bars and at the movies. I see her waiting in line and taking her turn, driving to work, and lying on the beach. I see her renouncing booze and taking up religion and then renouncing religion and embracing suburban quietude. I see her cooking and eating and running from place to place—alone or with children, it doesn’t matter, because she will always be alone and she will come to know it and accept it, although people will crowd around her and want to convince her otherwise. It won’t matter. I see her getting sick and recovering and getting sick again. I see her moving from place to place. I see her walking with the same unsteady wobble. I hear her praises being sung, and I see her being vilified by one and the same person. I see her wandering under the stars at night. I see her looking at herself in the mirror. Sticking out her tongue. Feeding the birds. Collecting wood for a fire. Riding an escalator. Digging in a garden. I see her growing old. I see her dying.

  When I open my eyes again it is dawn. The curtains billow at the open window, and the morning air blowing through it has freshened the atmosphere. Mohr’s features stand out clearly in this dull grey light. He seems more peaceful in this light than under the incandescent glare of the lamp. I stand and stretch on unsteady legs, my head still clouded with wine, my mouth dry. I glance at the bottle and resist the urge to finish it off, reaching instead for the plastic water pitcher on the bedside table and draining it in one long draft.

  “Excuse me.” The voice startles me. The nurse is standing in the doorway. “What are you doing here?” She appears startled as well and moves quickly into the room with an expression of disapproval. On seeing Mohr she checks herself. “Oh my,” she says.

  I put the pitcher back on the table. “He died last night.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. He was gone when I arrived.”

  “When did you get here? How did you get in?” Her voice registers alarm. My shabby appearance is having an effect on her.

  “I don’t know what time it was, exactly.”

  She is flustered. “I didn’t hear anything. Who let you in?”

  I point to the open window. “It was that or sit outside all night. I hope it’s not a problem.”

  She glances at Mohr, then hastens over to close the window. “As a matter of fact, it is a problem,” she says, pulling the window shut. “You are trespassing. You had no right breaking in here.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “That’s not the point.” She moves over to the bed, picks up the coiled plastic tube lying on the floor, and hangs it on a hook by the bed; shoots me a look that is meant to entertain and dismiss her first cruel suspicion. “The point is that this is private property and you are trespassing.” She picks up the bottle from the floor. “I suppose this is yours.”

  I nod, offer to take it from her, but she retracts it.

  “Look. I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t get out of this house immediately I’m calling the police.”

  “I was here yesterday. Remember?”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Don’t give me that beside-the-point bullshit. I’m a friend of his. A friend. Understand?”

  She pushes past me and yanks open the door. “You’re trespassing on private property. Now please leave.” She holds out the bottle. “And take your liquor and your gun with you.”

  I look down to see the butt of the gun sticking out from under my shirt, tuck it back in feeling oddly exposed and unable to defend myself.

  “Get out,” she commands, and I obey, pausing at the door for one last look at Mohr. The nurse, assured now of her control, escorts me to the front door. “You can call to find out what arrangements have been made,” she says.

  “Arrangements for what?”

  “For services.”

  “Who arranges for services?”

  “We have written instructions.” Then she closes the door.

  The morning air is refreshing. There is nothing left but to clear my head and walk off my hangover. I leave the bottle on the porch steps and start for home.

  Bright, cloudless dawn. The sun rising at my back, my shadow stretches long and spindly on the road ahead. A light dew covers the open fields, reflecting sparks and glints of morning light. I would like to take it all in, but my head feels tight, constricted, my vision pinched at the edges. It is not just the lingering effect of alcohol but some organic impurity of spirit and a general lack of conscious clarity that prevents me from attending to the quiet beauty of the morning. It is as though I were viewing the world through a rolled tube and breathing through that same tube and never achieving fullness of vision or aspiration and always aware of the limits and boundaries of this tight, conscripted subjectivity.

  I pace along, watch the lengthened stride of my shadow on the pavement. A flock of birds erupts from a tree in the distance. I stop to watch as a huge sprinkler cuts on in the field to my right, an enormous wheel-mounted arachnid contraption that straddles the rows of corn and moves up and down them spraying in all directions. A generator pumps water through miles of bony pipe—ftht ftht ftht—a pickup truck speeds by, stirring a pungent smell into the air, the smell of manure and petrochemically fertilized earth and out of this the distilled odor of the world going diligently about its business, not meandering but working, working—even the corn working in the field and the big watering contraption roving up and down the rows like some cruel galley master shouting and brandishing a whip. Keep up the pace. Faster faster faster.

  At the bend in the road I stop for a rest, mouth dry, sour wine in my stomach. A car drives past. The driver waves. I sit down on the bank of a narrow ditch that runs alongside the road. The sun is climbing. It is growing warmer. Dew is steaming off the fields and the wet shoulder of the road.

  Another car blows past, then slows, reverses.

  Ed Maver rolls down the window. “You all right there, buddy?”

  I greet him with a tired wave. “Yes. Just resting.”

  “What are you doing way out here this time of morning?”

  “Just out walking.”

  “You walked all the way out here?”

  I nod.

  “Goddamn, you must’ve been out walking all night.”

  I shrug.

  “Hop in. I’ll take you home.”

  “Thanks, no. I’ll walk.”

  “C’mon there, give the old feet a break.”

  “No thanks.” I stand up, brush the seat of my pants.

  Maver eyes me. “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Do you have any water with you?”

  He lifts a plastic-lidded mug from between his thighs. “Just coffee. Here, have some.”

  I accept the mug, drink a mouthful, and offer it back.

  “Go on, finish it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Had two cups already this morning.”

  The coffee is warm and sweet. I drink it down in large, stomach-warming swallows. Maver looks on curiously, the bill of his cap tilted up.

  I return the mug to him. “Thanks.”

  “C’mon now. Climb in and drive to town with me. We can stop for more coffee on the way.”

  “I would prefer to walk.”

  “Don’t give me that would-prefer bullshit. You look like you tied one on but good last night. A dose of Maver’s sure-fire hangover medicine’ll set you right. Cold V8 and scrambled eggs. C’mon and get in! It’ll take you all morning to get back to town.”

  “I’m not in a hurry.”
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  Maver shrugs, returns the mug to a plastic holder suspended from the dashboard. “Suit yourself, buddy,” he says and yanks down on the gearshift. “One of these days you’re going to get sick of walking, and when you do I want to be right there to help you pick out a brand-new car.”

  “Thanks for the coffee, Ed.” I wave, realizing that I’ve never called him by his name before.

  “Sure thing, Horace,” he says.

  “Lucian,” I correct him.

  “Isn’t your name Horace?”

  “Not anymore. I changed it.”

  “I’ll be damned.” He shakes his head in friendly bewilderment. “Well, it’s a free country,” he says and pulls away, waving an arm out the window.

  I continue on more steadily with Maver’s coffee warm in my stomach and his last words in my head—free country. A free country. How so, free? And wherefore this flight of words? This fleeing from self to self? Name to name? Wherefore this alien body that subsumes itself in a multitude of names and never comes closer to knowing itself than when it casts a name aside and flees from it? Is that what free means? I can’t say, and no one has told me. If you ask me I will admit that I am Chidiock Tichborne and William Blake and Horace and Lucian of Samosata since they are all I have, my head, my arms, my legs—my only limbs. And I use them freely to navigate the open road that runs between Oblivion and oblivion.

  As I near the curve ahead Tom Schroeder rides past me on his motorcycle. He skids and almost falls off before wresting control and coming to a stop by the side of the road. I walk past, ignoring him, but he pulls alongside, pedaling the ground with one foot. Our morning shadows stretch long on the road ahead. “Where’s Sylvia?” he demands.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know. Mexico. Argentina. Anywhere.”