Present

Mina, a perky Colombian woman not far from my age, is arranging sandwiches for the supermarket's Sunday afternoon flood, while I await salmon.  The latter will be the cooked variety, for the California sun is blasting away, summer style.  We are going to have a salad.  A big salad.  And 'we' is a big five guests, invited for a late afternoon Sunday gathering in my apartment.  Life goes on.  How is my wife, Mina asks?

The question doesn't throw me, or even spur me toward tears.  There is something about Mina, bustling and lighthearted and present, that makes me answer truthfully.  Dead.  Last month, I add.  Why not just say it?  I roll into Shopping Land on such a regular basis, the crew might as well be prepared. 

Barely a beat separates Mina's mildly stunned incredulity from religious nostrum.  Don't worry, she tells me, your wife is in a better place.  Mina gives me a hug.  Her colleague gives me the salmon.  I give them both the slip.

On my birthday, the 60th and laden with the usual baggage, Marlou held a party.  It was a small gathering, but big enough.  She had been diagnosed with cancer for barely two months.  Her chemotherapy was under way and she was cranked up on steroids.  Party planning, one of Marlou's favorite pastimes, was in high gear.  She had uncharacteristically planned substantial entertainment.  People, one of them me, were supposed to sing.  She had duplicated music and passed out the scores to various showtunes.  We all gave it a go.  I sensed the evening was about her, which made the proceedings somewhat awkward, but the way revealed itself.  I toasted her as the love of my life.  The words sounded a bit much, over the top.  But they seemed the right words.  And time has revealed them to be just that, an accurate reportage.  One life.  Only so many loves, time and space being what they are.  What seemed a bit forced at the time, has gathered force over time.

Which is why the converse seems equally plausible.  The love of my death.  I am having dreams, strange dreams.  Layered bonbons, carefully crafted and made of bone, flesh and blood, appear in a fancy box.  I eat the wrong one.  The punishment will be dire. 

Retribution, guilt, verdict.  I'm not sure what it means, except that I am the survivor.  And should not be.  Where this comes from, and how the equation developed, is unclear.  The dream seems all about fear, darkness and, of course, death.  Mine, it seems, in the wake of Marlou's...one of those messages that only comes as an intimation.  Like a road sign barely glimpsed, speeding along on holiday.  Did it really say Bridge Subject to Washout?  Or was I just imagining.

*                                   *                                   *

Because there is no larger plan, not even an imagined shape to the future, life's mundanities have taken over the entire stage.  They are like supernumeraries in some inflated production who know they will never see the spotlight again.  They demand attention and do not reward it. 

Consumer Reports is staring at me from somewhere in Iowa.  All I have to do is check a box and they will return to Iowa.  Maybe I will go to Iowa myself and talk to them.  In fact, I intend to go anyway, for Marlou has family there and I want to keep in touch.  I have questions for Consumer Reports.  What is it like in Iowa?  Aren't the winters cold?  Don't you feel bad sucking the lifeblood out of the agrarian economy so you can mail magazines?  Is it really worth it?  As I consider this, it seems really worth it to subscribe for five years.  Consumer Reports will leave me alone.  Besides, in a couple of months there's a big exposé on dishwashers.  The essential myth behind boiling hot water sprayed at plates and glasses, caustic soap eating its way through your spoons, all of this will fall to the wayside.  The truth.  Five years.  It would lighten my load to just pay these people and forget about it.

I've already forgotten about so much.  The New York Review of Books bursts into my mailbox every couple of weeks, all these brilliant writers being their ineffable selves, and I stare blankly at the copies and drop them in a pile.  Melinda has done me the Jewish Family Service of putting my magazine subscriptions on hold.  Everything is on hold.

Fortunately my friend Bob was on hold this morning, making an attempt to talk to a software company.  A program wasn't working.  To put a finer point on it, a voice recorder that stores dictation for automated transcription wasn't working.  Made by Philips in 2007, the product has dropped out of existence.  The software vendor knows nothing about it.  Phillips does not list the product number on its website. 

Drop everything.  This is my newest modus operandi.  Lunching on the kitchen counter, I knock the top to a jar on the floor.  As I reach for a napkin, the saltshaker plunges to the linoleum. Demons have braided the pull cords on my venetian blinds.  It has taken me weeks to read a 150 page novel. 

In the afternoon, my feet mechanically cranked up in an electric recliner, I stare at the wall for signs of continental drift.  Now and then I see them.  My apartment is definitely getting closer to Redwood City, where the train service is better and one can easily nip over to government offices to tidy up this or that piece of official business.  Left to their own devices, devices such as my stereo-TV-cable box, hum to themselves.  Hmmm.  A small click emanates from the kitchen clock, an hour having passed.  Old Man River.

The electric reclining chair is the source of some concern.  Marlou was determined to get this thing, having watched me struggle -- her word, not mine -- with getting the footrests up on its predecessor.  So now I'm fully automated and anxious.  It is unclear to me what will happen if the power grid fails.  And it does, often enough.  The manufacturer wants me to believe that a tiny nine-volt battery will provide backup.  There is no backup.  That is the point.  I am on my own.

Which is patently untrue.  There are plenty of people around who care about me.  Friends and phone calls and e-mails and visits and offers.  Like this one mailed from TempurPedic.  I can get a new Swedish bed for cheap.  The current one, Marlou's deathbed, may be haunted.  What can TempurPedic do about this?  There's nothing on their website.  What kind of Swedes are they?  They have the entire winter to brood in the dark about beds and mortality, drinking and thinking.  Okay, driving too.  And all they have to offer is another spine-supporting box of foam.  Swedish meatballs.

A hospice nurse explained to Marlou that human anxiety always rises at night.  Mine certainly does.  And what precisely is rising baffles and irritates me.  I complain, and yet there is backup, plenty of it.  Lorna will roll in tomorrow morning at the startling hour of 7 AM, roust me into my clothes and out the door for breakfast with a friend.  My life is neither dangerous nor empty.  And yet it feels so.  Marlou's night fear, heartbreaking to consider, is part of history.  Mine is part of the present.  And being even halfway part of the present, present and accounted for, has become a full-time job.