A Box of Matches (2 page)

Good morning, it’s 4:45 a.m., and today after I made the fire I just sat for ten minutes doing nothing. Every so often I yawned, leaning forward in my chair with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped. Sometimes a yawn will take on a life of its own, becoming larger and more extensive than I could have foretold, forcing me to bow my head and gape until several drops of saliva, fed by streams on the insides of my cheeks, collect at the corners of my mouth and fall to the floor. After a few large down-yawns like these, my eyes are lubricated and I can think more clearly. I don’t know whether scientific studies of the human yawn have taken into account the way it helps to lubricate the eyeballs.

I do worry about the duck in the cold. She’s probably
awake. We have a duck that lives in a doghouse outside. At night we drape a blanket over the doghouse and put a portable window screen over its front entrance. The screen is there to keep out foxes and coyotes. There is a red fox that lives on the hill with a bushy horizontal tail that is almost as big as he is, and at night sometimes you can hear the coyotes hooting from the fields on the other side of the river.

The duck’s blue dish freezes overnight. Every morning, before I leave for work (dropping Phoebe at school on the way), I hit the bowl upside down against a snow-pile and a disk of ice plops out: the bowl is self-cleaning in this weather. There are several other ice disks lying around in the snow, and these are pecked at by crows in the daytime. They look like UFOs, or maybe more like corneas—the layer of half-dissolved duck food frozen at the upturned bottom is the iris. The duck emerges, making her tiny rapid cheeps, excited over the prospect of the warm water, which steams when I pour it in the bowl. She makes long scoops of water with her under-beak and then straightens her neck to let the warmth slide down. I hold out a handful of feed, and she goes at it with her beak, very fast, with much faster
movements than humans can make, moving like the typing ball on an old IBM Selectric. Some of the feed falls in the water, and that gets her crazy: she roots around in the swampy warmth, rapping at the bottom and finding all the nuggets that swirl there, making the water cloudy with the outflow from her throat. After a last burst of eating she looks up and is still, working her neck twice to settle her breakfast, and she walks out with me down the driveway. Sometimes here she will flap her wings hard, high-stepping in place without becoming airborne, like a jogger at a stoplight; sometimes she takes flight, although she hasn’t completely refined her landings. Her eyes are on the sides of her head: she has to turn away from me to look up at me, then out at the world, then up at me again.

Last night I was lying in bed when I heard a terribly sad sound, as of a cat in distress or an infant keening in the cold: long, slow, heart-rending cries. I half rose and held my breath and listened intently—was it the duck?—but the sound had stopped. I almost woke Claire to ask her what I should do. And then, as I resumed breathing, I realized that I was hearing a whistling coming from some minor obstruction in my own nose as I breathed.

At times, when I sit here, a long series of daytime thoughts will pass through me—thoughts connected with work or, say, with town politics. That’s all right—let those thoughts pass through you. You hear them coming, like a freight train with the whistle and the dinging; they take several minutes to go by, and then they’re gone. Remember that it’s very early in the morning—early, early, early, early. Sometimes the stars are thrillingly sharp when I first get up and stand at the window on the landing of the stairs: private needle-holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama. Orion’s belt is the only constellation that I recognize easily. The apportioning of stars into constellations is unnecessary: their anonymity enhances the sense of infinitude. This morning I saw a long pale mark like a scar across the heavens. It was the trail of a high jet, a night flight from somewhere to somewhere, lit from the underside by the setting moon. “A moonlit contrail,” I whispered to myself, and then I came downstairs and felt for the coffeemaker.

Good morning, it’s 4:52 a.m., and I’m very glad to be conscious when nobody else is conscious. To get to this point, where I am the sole node of wakefulness at the heart of the sleeping world, takes a fair amount of preparatory work. I have to get out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Claire, and I have to put on my bathrobe; I have to cinch snug the flannel sash and come downstairs by the front stairs, so as not to wake my son, whose bedroom is at the top of the back stairs, and I have to make coffee.

Making coffee in the dark, especially when the moon has set, or when there is no moon, is a skill that improves with practice. First you pull out the old filter, with its layer of coffee sludge, and pin its sides together like a soft
taco so that you can get it safely into the garbage can without spilling, and then you rinse out the filter basket and the carafe, taking special care to clean the little hole in the plastic top of the carafe, which is like the hole in the top of a baby’s head, where the coffee tinkles down from the basket and into the baby’s brain. And you stretch the fluted mass of paper filters so that your fingers can feel and take hold of one layer—a sensation similar to turning the pages of an eighteenth-century book—and you settle the filter in the basket so that none of its sides are likely to flop over, allowing the water to flow around the coffee without drawing out its liquor. When in darkness you scoop new coffee into the new filter, the danger is that the coffee will unbeknownst to you stay stuck in the scooper, and that you will think you are pouring in scoop after scoop when in fact nothing is going in. Today to be sure I poked my finger into the mound in the filter until I crunched bottom: I felt the coffee grains go past my first knuckle and a little way to the second—but I added another scoop to be sure.

Filling the carafe with water is not so difficult as measuring the coffee, because the sink is directly under the window, and I can sense the weight of the water; but
when I pour the water into the top of the coffeemaker sometimes some streams out and down the sides and onto the counter. But who cares? It’s just water. It’ll be dry by the time there is light.

Then, back in this living room, I position the chair and make sure my computer is plugged in, since its battery no longer holds a charge. I bought it for $250 from a used-computer store several weeks ago: once it was the sleekest and most desirable of black laptops, now it is practically junk. Someone, not me, has worn away the stippling on the space bar under the resting place of the right thumb, and the upright of the
T
is gone; I’ve changed the screen colors so that they display dark blue letters against a black background, almost illegible even in the dark, and when I’m ready to start typing I tip the screen towards me, so that it nearly grazes the tops of my prancing fingers. I’ve always liked the phrase
touch-typing:
I type by touch, staring at, or at least looking steadily at, the fire.

When I lit the fire this morning, a pompadour styling of flame came forward from underneath and swooped back around a half-detached piece of bark. Right now there is one flame near the front that has a purple
underpainting but a strong opacity of yellows and oranges and whites: it is flapping like one of those pennants that used to be strung around used-car lots. You don’t see those so much anymore: multicolored vinyl triangular flags on cords that hopeful sales managers hung from pole to pole to offer a sense of carnival.

Good morning, it’s 4:20 a.m.—You know, I used to have trouble sleeping, but now I have much less trouble because I’m getting up at four in the morning. Before five, anyway. I’m so sleepy that I sleep well. For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep. By day I’m not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my ear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp, slippery stalagmites. Wearing a helmet and pilot’s gear, I would miniaturize myself, and wait for a giant screwdriver to unscrew the hatch at the nose of a bullet. I would be lowered into the control room of the bullet, whereupon the hatch would be screwed tight over me. At
a certain moment, I would flick a switch and the gun would fire, throwing me back in my seat. I would shoot out the muzzle and over the sleeping city, following a path towards my own house; I would crash through the window and plunge toward my own head, and when the bullet dove into my brain I would fall asleep.

Now I lie in bed and think a few random things about soil erosion or painting a long yellow strip on the side of a black ship, and because I’ve gotten up so early, I just fall asleep. The soporific suicidalism peaked several years ago, when we were staying for a few months in San Diego, so that I could “encourage” a group of doctors who were supposed to be revising their textbook. My brain was alive with the nightcrawlerly unfinishedness of the project, and there were four palm trees that I could see from the window of the room that I was using as a temporary office. The palms were beautiful trees in their way, especially as part of a quartet, but there is an intrinsic scrawniness to the palm, which grows like a flaring match, with a little fizzle of green at the top. It is doing only what is absolutely necessary to do to be a tree; and it has big, coarse leaves—intemperate leaves—and the bark shows its years on the outside, so that the tree
has no secrets: it doesn’t have to die and be cut down before you can date its birth. I would look up at those four trees as I worked, and then at night I would imagine digging my own grave, because it just seemed that it would be so much easier to die than to get those three contentious doctors to contribute their material for the new and heavily revised edition of
Spinal Cord Trauma
. Claire and the children would be fully provided for as long as I was able to craft a way of dying that didn’t seem like suicide. But eventually the new edition was written, and then it was copyedited and indexed and published and distributed, and now medical-school students are buying it and underlining things in it, and all is as it should be.

At around four-thirty, sometimes later, the freight-train whistle goes off. At seven I have to get dressed and drop my daughter Phoebe off at school and drive to work. I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty. A
hundred years ago, a trolley line and two passenger trains came through this town; Rudyard Kipling reportedly stayed here for a week on his way inland to his house in Vermont, where he wrote the
Just So Stories
. “How the Leopard Got His Spots” is a good one. My mother read it to my brother and me, and it changed the way I thought about shadows. There were several places in our yard that offered Kipling’s kind of jigsawed shade. The euonymus tree that grew near the edge of our property worked best. Euonymus bark has beautiful fins, and under this low tree I could sit and watch the sunlight break into pieces.

I like deciduous trees, frankly, especially trees with lichen growing on them. I like living in the east, I like old brass boxes with scratches, I like the way fireplaces look when they’ve held thousands of fires. The fireplace that I’m sitting in front of was built, supposedly, in 1780. How many fires has it held? Two hundred a year times two hundred years: forty thousand fires? I like to burn wood. I’ve only discovered this recently. Last year, Claire gave me an ax for my birthday, and I began using it to chop up the scrap wood that the contractors piled up where they were reconstructing our slumped barn. If you bring the
ax down really hard, right in the middle of a six-inch board, the board will break in two longways, and the grain of the breakage will sometimes detour nicely around a knothole. Then you can chop across the grain. Apple boughs are very hard to chop, even the old gray ones that have lost their bark. You slam away at them for five minutes and then suddenly, if you hit them just right, they leap up at you and whack you in the face. Contractor’s scraps burn with many little explosions and whistling sighs.

When we had burned through most of the scraps, I called up a wood man and ordered a cord. A cord is a unit of measure that means “a goodly amount.” The wood man used a large pincering hook to snag the quartered logs off his truck. He drove off with a pale blue check in his hand, leaving us with a heap of logs. This heap Claire and I, over the next week, built into a long, neat edifice against the barn. You crisscross the logs: three one way, and then three over those going the other way, and you put each crisscrossing pile next to the other, and you have to choose the logs so that the pile will remain stable and not topple; and you surmount the whole architecture with a roof made of stray pieces of bark. It takes on an air of
permanency, like a stone wall—so finished seeming that you hesitate before pulling from it the first few logs for burning.

The woodpile quickly became an object of fascination for the duck. She roots in between the logs and bangs at the bark with her beak until some breaks off, to see if there are bugs underneath. Now that everything is frozen, there is much less for her to eat there, but once in the fall I lifted a bottom log for her and she found an ant colony and several worms which she consumed with much lusty beak smacking. She is a dirty eater. She snuffles in mud and grass and then goes over to the plastic wading pool that we set up for her and drinks from it, and streams of dirt flow from her beak as she scoops up the water. When she has found a patch of wet earth or weeds that particularly pleases, she makes a whimpering sound of happiness, as a piglet would at the udder. I had no idea that ducks were capable of such noises. In coloration she resembles a tabby cat.