Sleepwalking

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    You can’t slam a screen door. You throw your weight behind one and it only hisses a little harder before gently nestling back into its frame. Which is like a metaphor for everything. There’s a way things work and I throw myself at them and try to force them to do something they can’t do. Won’t do. Because I’m mad about something else.
    I want to rip the thing off its hinges, but then I’d just be the guy going crazy on his front door, grasping and yanking and making a scene, my neighbors inside their own screen doors watching. Like, “Thank God that isn’t us.” Calling the cops, probably. A bodycam video of me smirking, saying, “Of course. Of course they did. Oh that’s—really?”
    All because of one of those situations where we’d both let it go too far. A mild suggestion, a defensive reply. Then somehow we’re throwing glasses of water into the sink and storming out one after the other.
    Pure cliché. To even say how clichéd it is is a cliché. To notice this, the irony in this Russian nesting doll of clichés, is also—Christ.
    Her fault more than mine, though. I know how that sounds. Shut up. You don’t know us. You haven’t seen.
    Walking and talking to myself now, not finishing sentences or ideas, just moving from the white hot image of her face to my purple feelings to the green foliage bursting out over the fences of the houses I pass. No circling back, no getting to the point, no progress. Her and the ways she’s getting in the way of my goals and dreams but also my stupidity and mistakes because our problems shouldn’t matter, should they? All these chores that have to be done and money. Money.
    Christ.
    Having to apologize. Or waiting for her to apologize. Like someone holding a sign at an intersection before the interstate: If you find it within your heart…
    I’m always the one with the sign. Always waiting for her. But if I told her that, she’d say, No it’s me with the sign. I’m the one.
    Christ.
    Out of the poor neighborhood and up into the rich neighborhood, out of my mind. Divorce, she’d said, but only because I’d said it, which I only did to see if she’d go there after I went there, to see if she was thinking all the things I knew she was thinking.
    This is how we talk to each other now, in riddles, tests which we use, after the other fails, to justify testing the other in the first place.
    But even if you acknowledge this, when you’re sitting at the kitchen table stunned into silence by the thrown plates and the turned over chairs, it has no effect on your ability to stop.
    Irony, cliché, Babushka—Jesus H.
    A car locks as I pass it. I look up from my feet to the windows of these palatial Victorians and craftsmens for the stay-at-home neurotic who doesn’t trust me. In the house across the street, a mock tudor that looks like an inn, a curtain shakes and settles from having just been pulled.
    I say, out loud, “You think I’m gonna break into your Pathfinder, you rich idiot?”
    But I can see it from their perspective. I’m out here roaming the streets, muttering to myself about nonsense, because there is no place in the world for me where I am not completely ruining everything. Because the world doesn’t make sense to me. Like I’m a child. And, actually, for even saying that, for being an adult who says, “I am a child,” this only proves how much of a child I am.
    Boo hoo. Poor—whatever.
    I really shouldn’t have said “Christ” all those times.
    Son of God, have mercy, a sinner, etc.
    No. Really. Like—
    I keep it moving. And that’s when it appears, this one house. I want it. Covet it, really, in the biblical sense. Want it so much I should go to Hell for it. Steep roof and an archway leading to wooden double doors, slightly offset to the left. This magnificent asymmetry. The siding that of old English houses, plaster-like, textured. Gorgeous, grey, streaky stains from the rain trickling down from the window panes, stains that make you feel something, like you’re part of a great story. Stains you’d see and know you’re home. The longer I look, the more stained-glass I find—above the double doors, in the corners of two of the windows, at my eye line on the fence to the backyard.
    I take a picture. If I hadn’t just walked out of my house after she said, “If you leave, then you’re the one leaving, not me,” I would have sent the picture to her, asking, “Can you imagine if we had something like this?”
    The right of the double-doors opens. A small man waddles out. A Vietnam veteran hat and slacks pulled up to his nipples. He walks through the archway and off the entryway’s stone slab until he reaches an ornamental, iron donkey. The donkey sits at the beginning of the path to the sidewalk, where I stand, holding my phone.
    “Do I know you?” the man asks.
    “Sorry—no,” I say, then add, “I love your house!”
    He shields his eyes from the sun.
    “Do I know you?”
    “No, I—”
    “Oh, I know you.”
    The golden smell of honeysuckle floats down the street.
    “You’re the young man who walks around here,” he says.
    A coo-cooing bird above us somewhere.
    He turns and gestures toward his backyard.
    “I wonder if you might could help me.”

    We walk into his backyard to where he needs the help. A rotting shed, full of a bunch of crap.
    “There’s no doing. With my knees,” he tells me.
    He needs everything out and organized and then the shed torn down.
    “My wife is dead,” he says. “My son lives in Berlin. Even if he were here he wouldn’t know that he should do all this or how. And look at you.”
    He slaps my back. I have about a foot on him. He points to the sledgehammer leaned against the shed door. Maybe it would be good to be in my body, remind myself I am alive, but also maybe if I do this for him I could become the son he wishes he had and then, like in a movie, he’d die and leave me the house, and I’d have somewhere to go, a place to be, after my wife leaves me and steals the house and the dogs and our soon-to-be-born child and whatever other terrible things she has planned now that I’ve run away.
    The old man turns and coughs as he walks back towards the house and that seals the deal.
    I start by getting all the crap out. Decades of moldy gardening equipment, bags and bags of some kind of seed, the white plastic weathered to blankness, and tools I don’t understand with drill-like parts and levers that pinch, and a long weird table warped from rain. Mud accumulated in the corners. A hole in the ceiling.
    I punch out the windows and send the glass flying. I cripple the corner beams. Yeah. This is it. The man watches for some time, reclined in one of the lawn chairs on his back porch, but by the time I finish, he’s asleep, his arms crossed over his stomach. He doesn’t move, even as I clank all the stuff together into three piles—Garbage, Could Be Worth Something, and Don’t Know.
    Early Spring. Too hot for March, but I like it. I walk up the slate steps and sit beside him on another chair. I pull out my phone to call my wife and tell her what I’ve done and how the house might one day be mine, ours. We’d talked about looking for something bigger, especially now that she’s three months along. But that’s all it was, talk. I’ve already told you about the money.
    The man lies so still that I put my dirty hand under his nose to check if he’s breathing. A hot and gentle stream wafts over my soil-wet fingers. I lay back and look up at the paling sky through the leaves.
    See, I’m fine. We’re all fine. It’s going to be fine.

    I wake up to him shaking me in the dark.
    “Son, son,” he says. “Son.”
    I grab him and shout, “What, what? Is she—what?”
    He explains he thought what I’d thought about him earlier, that I was dead.
    “You scared me,” he says, pointing to my forearm, where there’s a long, deepish gash, trailed by a thick, black line of blood.
    Whoops.
    I check my phone. No calls from the wife. I guess that settles that.
    “Now listen,” the man says. “Thank you, son. I’m sorry about all that.”
    He points again at my arm. A floodlight clicks on behind him from our movement, and the light haloes his now hatless, wiry-haired head.
    “Let’s get you something,” he says, holding my elbow, pulling me in.
    The sliding glass doors open to a living room full of animal heads, maroon paisley wallpaper, chairs and couches covered in brocade fabrics, flowers and vines, studded with metal rivets, moodily lit by lamps with incandescent bulbs.
    “Sit,” he says, pointing to the one modern feature, a 90’s Lay-Z-Boy. I sit and relax and watch him through a small opening above a row of bar chairs. He pulls things out of a refrigerator and works steadily, his hands just out of my sight, below the frame of the opening. He walks back into the living room with a sandwich on a China plate, decorative Greek-like shapes ringing the edge, a pickle on the side.
    “Well, I’m the praying sort,” he says.
    “Same,” I say.
    “Good.”
    He stands over me and says grace, then offers me the sandwich. He touches my shoulders, kind of leans his weight into me through his hands before walking to a leather chair opposite me, from which he watches me eat. Bologna and ketchup. Nothing ever tasted so wonderful.
    “You seemed troubled,” he says as I finish. “Earlier. Out on the road.”
    I shrug. He stares at me.
    “Stressed,” I say.
    He laughs and says, “Young man with the stress.”
    “Young people can’t have problems?”
    “No,” he says. “They can’t.”
    I wait a second before giving in.
    “Wife and me. Fight we had. It got ugly,” I say.
    He coughs. “People fight,” he says. “It’s what they do.”
    “Not like this.”
    “Like what?”
    I put the plate on the floor.
    I say, “I want to do something with my life. Like write a book, but not that, something else. Something like that. Something that means something. But my time just keeps getting taken away from me. Like, there’s this life out there that I want, and I don’t have it, and I don’t know how to get it, but I think I deserve it, or not that—I deserve to try to get it. And that shouldn’t be a problem, me trying. We also need me to try. Because we need money, right? So I tell my wife this and try to explain, ok, here’s what I need from you, here’s what would be good. An afternoon to plan this or go over here or look into that. Get this kind of credit card. But she’s pregnant and things like this just send her over the edge, you know? She starts worrying about the baby, and will I be around, and do I want this, do I actually want this and her and all of it? Things get drawn out. Everything I say gets interpreted so—and I try to say, ‘Ok, listen, listen, all I’m saying is I have to do blah blah blah, I have to go do that now, but I’ll be back, I always come back, please,’ and she’s always like, ‘But you’re not always going to be able to do blah blah blah’ and I’m like, ‘You think I don’t know that?’ and she’s always like, ‘Not when you talk like this.’ And then we’re shouting at each other again. While we’re taking twenty, forty, hundreds of dollars out of savings every month. Putting the rent on the other credit card.”
    He closes his eyes. I keep going.
    “And even after we make up, I ask, ‘You ok?’ And she’s sitting there saying, ‘Yeah,’ but she’s not, and I know it, and she knows it, and knows I know it, so I call her a liar, and she admits that I’m right, she’s not ok, but won’t admit she’s lied and it’s just like, ‘What? Why?’”
    He produces a handkerchief and blows his nose.
    “And now she’s talking divorce. But she isn’t, not really, and I know that. It’s just something we say. Like, ‘So you want a divorce? Is that what you’re saying by not answering me?’ No. Duh.”
    He raises his eyebrows. This could be my way in. How he could see himself in me. He taps the leather chair.
    “So when you saw me, I’d been walking for a while, and it was like I was asleep and having nightmares, just nonsense in my head, just machine gun thoughts and noises. Like gah!”
    When I make this noise, I raise my hands up and claw at the air and bare my teeth like the bear's head above him.
    “Like that.”
    “Wow,” he says, yawning, melting into the chair. He closes his eyes again.
    “Anyway,” I say, “I think it’s gonna be fine. This is all because of my parents, too. They were a mess.”
    He sighs and opens his eyes.
    He says, “You know, I wrote a book once.”
    “Really?”
    He nods
    “Let me just…”
    He labors out of the chair and walks into a back room. He knocks around back there, sliding cardboard against cardboard and thunking this and that onto what sounds like carpet. I look around the room at the dead animals and then at my empty plate.
     It occurs to me that this guy owes me money. Look at all that I did. He better come back with some money or I’m leaving, because also, who am I kidding, getting the house?
    He comes in breathing heavy, says, “Here it is.”
    I go, “You know that stuff I said, about wanting to write a book being embarrassing, I didn’t—I mean—”
    “Here you go,” he says, pushing it into my hands.
    I turn it over. The cover is two flat panels of driftwood bound together by weathered hemp. In between the driftwood covers are thick, pulpy pieces of paper, threads of red and pink and brown running across their surface. Each page is devoted to a different kind of object—broken seashells, sea glass, small stones, dried flowers. These are attached to each page by string, sewn across each object and through the page in the form of an X.
    The book is no bigger than my palm.
    “Pretty neat huh?” he says.
    I flip through the book once quickly and then again slowly.
    He sits back down and looks out the window to the backyard, at the junk and the felled shed which the night has turned into bunches of mottled blackness against the grass.
    He says, “I made that on vacation. My wife and son. Acadia National Park. The eighties.”
    I nod.
    “Ex-wife,” he says.
    I say, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Well, you can have it,” he says.
    The thoroughbred head and the bison and the large-mouth bass all peer down from the wall and read the book over my shoulder. The pages double, my eyes crossing, woozy from the influx of calories and salt and what I now realize might be the loss of more than a little bit of blood. I put the book down and feel for the wound, but my fingers can’t find it.
    “Son, don’t let it get ugly. You have to cut and run before the ugliness. No use fighting a war at home. Got so bad for me and mine it was like I was slopping through those tunnels with Charlie again,” he says.
    I run my palms along my shins.
    “Don’t let love become a knife fight in the mud. Once you decide you’re out, you need to get out all the way. No taking the bait, picking up the phone. I mean obviously sometimes you need to, but you know what I mean.”
    I rub my elbows and my biceps, my neck. He shifts in his seat, sitting up straighter, prouder.
    “Children understand when they’re older. It’s hard at first, but then they understand. You buy them presents at Christmas and show up to the graduations and all of a sudden everything becomes kind of fixed. I had my trucking business. It was what it was. They get it. Eventually. They’re more resilient that people make out.”
    I ask, “Your son in Berlin gets it?”
    His face goes slack with disbelief. His now visible tongue and drooping cheeks asking, How could you ask me that?
    “That’s what I said,” he says.
    My phone buzzes and I turn it over. A picture of her floats around on the screen. Probably calling to pretend like nothing happened, to ask a favor, or, no, yell at me more for not calling, never doing anything, never finding a way forward, like she isn’t just as—
    “Better answer,” I say.
    “Sure,” he grunts, looking back out at the yard. He counts under his breath, I have no idea why.
    She probably won’t even ask if I’m ok. Won’t even think that I might be hurt. Which I guess I’m not now. She’ll want me to ask about her.
    “You know,” he says, “there’s a lot of stuff upstairs that I’m just going to end up taking to the Goodwill. Books and old toys. Stuff I can’t even remember, in boxes. We need it gone soon, before my son comes back and moves in.”
    The rectangle buzzes in my hand. Maybe there’s an emergency. Something’s wrong. She took a nap too and woke up with blood on the sheets and is scared and needs me to come home. Maybe it’s not even her. Maybe it’s a policeman looking for someone to explain what happened.
    “Maybe you and your wife,” he says, “if you’re still, or just you—you can come back and take what you can, or take it all, yes, that would be best I think, if you took it all, then you decide, you know, what you want and take the rest to Goodwill, or wherever you want, throw it away even, whatever you want.”
    Because why now? Why hasn’t she checked in? Why would she leave me worrying like this, unless she didn’t care?
    And the money. Where in America has all of the money gone?
    “But it should really happen sooner rather than later because my son is coming Friday and will need the room…”
    A yellow bird twitches off its plaque and flies just past my face, fluttering up to the sliding glass doors and then outside, sailing over the yard, towards the rising sun.
    This is one of those moments where you’re supposed to realize something, I realize.
     He’s still going on when I answer the call.