the coach would have her look-up and out and toward the wall. Who can blame her, not wanting always to swim into a wall, when looking down is where one might want to go. At least down there in the holes between the hairs tangled in the drain there is a possible way out.
OTHER THINGS GISELA DOES NOT WANT TO DO BESIDES PLAY TABLE TENNIS: She doesn’t want to play chess, she doesn’t want to go to a movie, she doesn’t want to lift weights. Gisela is too tired for all of this. Perhaps, another day, she tells Jurgen, she will go in-line skating when she is feeling better.
THINGS I DO NOT WANT TO DO: Cut the limb off the big maple that leans on the asphalt shingle roof covering my wife’s office and threatens to rot a hole all the way through to the timbers. Oil the windows so the sun and rain and snow don’t ruin the wood. Fix the drawers in my wife’s desk. She tries to pull them out and they don’t work, the bottoms fall through, and the drawers’ runners are broken or out of line, so that in order to open them she has to pull hard, making her stapler, and three-hole punch, and black Sharpies all jump from the drawer and onto the floor. I don’t want to bring in more wood for the fire. I really don’t mind the hearth turning cold under my butt, at least not for a while. It is still only fall and the clutch of winter not yet here and besides the last time I went to the log pile to get more wood, I stepped in dog shit and I don’t feel like having to shovel up the dog shit now so that I can get more armfuls of wood. Maybe I will feel like going in-line skating in a few days, but not right now. Not right now, Jurgen. I am so tired right now, and I can say that in German. I have learned that much.
WHAT I DO: I lie down and close my eyes. What I see is an outline on my eyelids of the spacecraft and I wonder if that’s where it’s been all this time anyway, and it’s never even been in the sky.
WHAT WE HEAR ON THE RADIO: That the animal shelter has an overabundance of cats. Cats are being brought in by the sackfuls, quite possibly, and now there is no more room. The shelter is full. Owners can’t afford their cats anymore. What will happen to the cats? I wonder. They will be turned out into the woods. The coyotes will make meals of them. They will try to survive. They will band together, they will roam in cat packs. Cars will have to stop and let them cross in packs across the road, yellow-eyed in the headlights and silent except for the flicking speech of the ends of their tails.
WHAT ELSE I HEAR ON THE RADIO: Transmissions from Mars. It’s a break in the reception, the show that’s on is interrupted by a series of broken beeps. Beep-di-dah-beep-di-dah-beep-beep-beep. When it happens, my wife puts her fingers up on her head like antennae of an alien and says in a monotone to the children: I am getting a transmission… the next flight to Mars is scheduled to lift off soon. This is a very important mission. We need to fill a number of vital posts on board. We are searching for a loyal and dedicated Head Potty Cleaner. We are pleased to announce that you, Sarah, have been especially selected for this high honor. Welcome aboard, Sarah, Head Potty Cleaner.
WHAT WE DON’T HAVE: Cats.
WHAT WE HAVE: The two dogs, of course, fish, crayfish, and a rabbit. The rabbit is now wearing diapers. Pampers, sized newborn. Because the rabbit wears diapers, it gets to come out of its cage and run around the house with us while we cook, while the children do their homework, and we are not worried about it peeing on the furniture. Rabbit pee smells worse than cat pee. The rabbit likes to stand on its hind legs in the easy chair and look out the picture window. The rabbit is really cute wearing diapers and my wife looks fondly at the rabbit, remembering when our children wore them, too.
WHAT THE RABBIT SEES: The pond, maybe, down our field. The chairs we sit on in the summer that I have not yet brought in. The rope swing I made for the children that hangs from the apple tree, now apple-less, now leafless.
WHAT THIS WEEKEND IS: Still bow season. I sit in my tree stand. I sit and listen and watch. It is raining. The drops of rain are good, masking any noise the turn of my head may make, the creak of a neck joint, a sigh I may exhale.
WHAT I DO: Go to my doctor’s appointment.
WHAT THE DOCTOR, MY DOCTOR, WORE WHEN I WENT FOR MY EXAM: A pink ribbon brooch. Anti-AIDS, anti-breast cancer sentiments pinned to his white coat lapel. And I wanted to ask where the pin was he might have had for anti-coma, and what would that look like, because I wanted to tell him about my son on floor 9, whom I had just come from visiting, still with his eyes closed.
WHAT THE DOCTOR OFFERED ME AFTER MY BLOOD WAS DRAWN: Orange juice.
WHAT I TALKED TO THE DOCTOR ABOUT AFTER MY BLOOD WAS DRAWN: A parallel universe, one that was created at the same time ours was. I had read this.
WHAT HE SAID: Yes, yes, that’s all very interesting. Now, about your levels.
WHAT I AM: An anomaly. A man my age with such high levels unheard-of. It’s only in older men, the doctor has told me, that we have seen these kinds of numbers. The doctor is a little giddy with the news he reads on the chart, and maybe he wouldn’t let his giddiness show if he were talking to someone who was not also a doctor, but being a doctor myself, he can let me join in on the wonderment of it all, the beauty in the numbers.
CALL: The alpaca that spit in my eye is dead.
ACTION: Drove to farm. The owner wanted to know what had done it. There’s no blood, the owner said, and there wasn’t, only the barn floor strewn with the neat balls of alpaca dung. He looks like he’s sleeping, that’s all, the owner said and he bent down next to the alpaca, putting his knees into the balls of dung, and stroked his belly. I looked around the barn and then I stepped outside and into the paddock where the alpaca used to stand and look out across the field. The field was wet from a storm in the middle of the night before. The storm came back to me and how the rain started to pour right after a deafening clap of thunder as if the rain had been kept inside a huge metal bin that spanned the sky and was suddenly released with the pull of a handle. He died from fear, I said to the owner. Your alpaca died when the thunder clapped.
WHAT THE OWNER SAID: Yes, it was loud here. I could see the lightning strikes start in the middle of the sky and then reach all the way down to the ground. We lost some trees and the phone even, he said. My heart raced, too, he said, and he stood and put his hands on his hips and shook his head while he looked at the alpaca. Then the man looked at me. Wait right here, he said. He went outside the barn. He looked left and then right. He is about to tell me something secret, I thought. Something no one else should know. He is about to tell me the name of the man who shot my son. I tried not to look too anxious. I looked at the dead alpaca, its cleft hooves filled with dirt and a bit of straw. I wrote down the name and number of a man I knew who could dig a hole for the alpaca on the property with his backhoe. The owner came back into the barn.
RESULT: The man looked around his barn. He spoke in a whisper. Maybe someday I’ll get another one. I’m whispering so the wife doesn’t hear. You see, they’re no trouble to keep. Have you seen their manure? It has no smell. It’s easy to clean. They do it all in the barn, not inconsiderate like a horse or a cow, going wherever and whenever it pleases in a field. No wonder he died of fear. He was gentle. He will go to alpaca heaven, the owner said, and I tried to picture what alpaca heaven would look like but all I pictured was the same barn I was standing in and the owner petting the dead alpaca’s side.
THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME: If I could time-travel in only one direction, would I go forward or backward?
WHAT THE WIFE COOKS FOR DINNER: Turkey soup with rice. I wanted noodles, but we had none. I helped her with the dinner. I pulled out the bag of basmati rice from the pantry. I washed the rice well. There were no Indian stones or bugs I wanted to find in a mouthful of soup.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Your levels will love this soup.
WHAT SARAH SAID WHILE WE ATE THE SOUP: Sam would hate this soup.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: He would not! Then she stood and dumped her soup into the kitchen sink and let the water run over it and watched it for a very long time.
CALL: A woman who needs a prepurchase exam on a Dales Pony.
ACTION: Drove to farm. X-rayed pony, checked his legs, did a spavin test, and, bending his leg at the knee, held knee bent for a while, looking to see how much it could flex.
RESULT: Dales Pony was in fine shape. Owner was thankful, asked, before I left, if I wanted to see her Mammoth Mules. Mammoth Mules? I asked. She led me to her back field. There they were, all sixty-five of them. The tallest maybe fifteen hands high. The last of their breed, she told me, and if it were not for her farm they would be extinct. I touched their huge, mammoth ears. Your mules are the horse for me, I said to her. They were so cute. I wanted to take one home.
