But he refused to view life as a sequence of setbacks from which no one recovers, save by being safely hidden under six feet of dirt. No. He believed his mother was in heaven. If she wasn’t, then nothing made any particular sense. He didn’t want to be a garden variety cynic. On their last trip to New York he had taken Diana to a revival of Man of La Mancha. He was disappointed when she viewed the play as loathsome—in contrast he had tingled with a gentle warmth. There was something to the old saw about grasping for straws.

Chapter 9

Who is left when everyone is gone? He watched Diana’s yellow Volvo disappear toward Traverse City, the faulty muffler putting along after the car disappeared, somehow as lonely as a dog barking far away in the night. Who is left but me standing on the porch on a June morning, and able to see a green leaf fall, for the first and last time, fifty yards away. Am I here if I abolish the input of my five senses? Sure. There’s still two hundred pounds of standing meat ignorant of the leaf. The sense of compactness alternated with the banality of worrying about one leaf out of trillions. He had felt a similar sorrow when an area of forest had been flooded long enough to kill the trees—as a child he had talked to trees until a neighbor kid had caught him and told everyone. Water had always been a question of too little, enough, too much. His thought processes lamely trailed off, then returned to the porch. At what point did changing his future merge with eternity itself? Death?

Rather than frighten himself he returned to the safety of the kitchen and a much needed grocery list and a large glass of cheapish but adequate Burgundy. Bread. Potatoes. Death. Orange juice. Eternity. Ivory liquid. Dreams. Garlic, with tarragon wafting into the future. He stopped short of imagining his funeral. He was unaware of the gravity, the unutterable danger of his situation, plucking himself, as he had, out of the man-swarm. Heraclitus said that the waking share one common world (cosmos), whereas the sleeping turn aside each man into a world of his own. If a Greek chorus had been present they would have been chanting, in effect: “Woe, a dream is not a map or manual, stupid. Woe, run to the church or psychiatrist. Head for the bar and your favorite beverage, kneel before womankind. Do not separate yourself. Join the army, get a job, help others. Do not act upon this dark secret. Woe, etc.”

At the IGA a shadow seemed to pass over him, despite the usual badinage with the wonderful bulbous-nosed butcher who always posed the same resonant question.

“How they hanging, Johnny.”

“Buono. Loose. Got this notion there’s something right around the corner.”