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Life in a chair

Beyond my book the machines are still mowing. I must ask about Herr Tabor. When Mad Meg died, I followed his coffin to the grave. I must ask, though I’m afraid. A nightmare woke me early, the great mound of my wife bulked beside me, the undrawn curtains like a fog across the windows, and the light pale where it puddled on the carpet. A soothsayer that’s what I need, someone to read the creases of the sheet, the design in the shadows, my entrails, dreams. I was about to fall from a great height into the sea, and I was wondering how I might contrive to strike the water so as to cancel consciousness completely, if not to die away at once like a friendship or a humiliated penis. Memory. Martha: she was once a maiden. Just imagine. Memory. Mine is fragile . . . fragile . . . only paper, my sanity, film thin. I am not a dreaming man . . . not normally. Daylight dreams, of course, consume me, but generally I fall asleep the way a peach is eaten. Between my eagerly approaching jaws there’s not a squirt of feeling. Martha. Maiden. Just imagine. The eyes at the end of my teeth suck nothing seen. Her thighs as a child are slim, her face is rosy. I was once a slim boy, too. No. I was fat as a baby, fat as boy; fat as a balloon, cub scout, school bus, hall monitor, frat pledge, army major. Fat as. Fat, I fall asleep. It is an ancient ambiguity (friend or enemy?): this slowing to a stop of all sensation. Torpid, I lie like a length of digesting snake or a long unillustrated book. In my dream I am hung in the sky like a dangle. Something flashes from me, streams away. The sea is the color of slate and rough as a roof, yet it seems to roll up the side of the sky as if I were looking at it through a bowl, perhaps as a fish does, which is puzzling because my perch is that of a bird. I decide to fall spread-eagle. In my dream I dream of drowning; that is, I consider it; I imagine drowning, think ahead, project; and the terror of it wakes me. It’s as if I were back in the army and my fall were a part of my duty. Odd. My wife is somewhere, and my children. I sense their presence indirectly: a whir of wheels behind me on a highway. The height is frightening, the trial falls are also awful—the rush of wind is very real—but the envisioned smother of the water: it is horrible. The sea—the sea as I sink is like gray porch paint, thick as treacle. This is a rehearsal. I know, but next time I shall open, swallow. The whole ocean will spill into me, drum like rain on the bottom of my belly. I decide to fall spread-eagle.