world.
WHAT MY DOCTOR DOES: Catches me at home. I pick up the phone, thinking it’s a call from a client. Before I know it’s him, I think it’s my father on the phone, just from the sound of his voice. I think my father is calling me, and I’m happy to talk to him, and I forget the impossibility of the situation, the fact being my father is dead, has been dead for a number of years. Died of lung cancer in a senior home called Sunrise, but I was always forgetting the name and calling it Sunset. The doctor has a gentle reminder for me. That is what he calls it, a gentle reminder. I’m past due for coming in to have my levels checked. He is looking forward to seeing me. He hopes that my family and I are well. Well? I want to say. I think of Sam, his eyes unopened in the yellow pastel room. I think of my wife, slipping into bed next to Sam, who still sleeps with a wizened chicken heart by his ear. I think what I hate to think about, that Sam may never wake up. I think about Sarah and Mia, interrupting their dinner to run to the pantry to find plastic jars and hold up their bottoms so I can see how we’re being robbed on a daily basis. Yes, we’re all fine, I say. I tell him I’ll be holding off on being retested. I tell him I don’t see the point in doing it again so soon. It’s sometimes good to know these things, he says. I tell him I know what he’s trying to say, but sometimes, I tell him, it’s also good not to know these things. He tells me it’s my choice. Why is he telling me that when I already know it’s my choice? Thank you, I say. You’re welcome, he says, and I know by the tone of his voice that I’ve disappointed him.
CALL: No call. I drive to John Bennett’s house. I sit parked, looking at it, waiting for signs of life, maybe his dog bouncing and barking, trying to look out a ground-floor window at who has parked on the side of the road, but there is no dog, and still no smoke coming from the chimney top.
ACTION: I drive to town hall. The clerk is named Jean and she’s sitting at her rolltop desk wearing sheep fleece slippers. Do you know John Bennett? I ask.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I know everyone. I’m the town clerk, remember?
WHAT I SAY: What’s he like?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: He pays his taxes. He buys dump stickers. He put an addition on his house in ’89. His dog’s name is Howie, a sweet collie mix that has seizures. He takes two pills a day for the seizures, but sometimes they still don’t work.
WHAT I SAY: How do you know?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I take care of Howie all winter while John’s in Florida.
WHAT I SAY: All winter?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: He’s a snowbird. He leaves before Halloween frost.
WHAT I SAY: That’s before hunting season.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Yes, before hunting season. He doesn’t buy a hunting license. The only license he buys is a dog license. You’re barking up the wrong tree with John Bennett.
WHAT I SAY: Who do you suggest I search out?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: I don’t suggest that kind of stuff. I can tell you what your taxes will be next year, though. I can tell you what the taxes were on the place in the 1800s. I can tell you if you add a twenty- by-five porch to your place what the taxes will be. But I can’t tell you what I don’t know.
WHAT I DO: I walk behind her. I look at the town map hanging above her desk. I look at all the houses that border my property. I see a house in the northeast corner I didn’t know was there before. Whose house is that? I ask.
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Anne Thompson’s. She’s the daughter of Sleeping Mary.
WHAT I SAY: Sleeping Mary?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Yes, she would go into a trance and tell the future. If someone wanted a session with her, they would go down to the library on Friday afternoons.
WHAT I SAY: Does she hunt?
WHAT JEAN DOES: Pulls out a book of every licensed hunter in our town. She copies the page for me. No, these are the people who hunt in this town, but anyone could have been walking on your property that day who had a hunting license. That’s all you need is a license, and some people don’t even bother to get one.
WHAT I SAY BEFORE I LEAVE: What about Howie? Did he bite the neck of a sheepdog?
WHAT JEAN SAYS: Howie’s a kitten. That sheepdog got his head cut up trying to limbo a barbed-wire fence on John Bennett’s property.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAYS AT NIGHT: “David,” it wakes me up, calling my name with a huge creak of its timbers. I look over at Jen, who is sleeping. It was not she who called out my name in her sleep. It must have been the house. What? I say in a whisper, but the house doesn’t answer.
WHAT GISELA SAID WHILE I WAS DRIVING: David, check your levels. When I listened to the CD again, she was talking about taking a visit to Tubingen. She was talking about buying more coffee because she had run out. She was talking about where to buy sweet bread. Now she was telling me to check my levels. Repeat after me, she said: Check your levels.
WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT DOING: Checking my levels because both the house and Gisela had told me to.
WHAT I THOUGHT WAS FUNNY: That my wife and a doctor had told me to go check my levels, but I didn’t want to do it, and now that a house and a German language CD are telling me to do it, I am considering it, especially if it means I might see the spacecraft again.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM RABBITS: That wherever you are, you must look for a place where you can run to and hide.
WHAT I TELL THE WIFE: Have you thought anymore about where we can live when we can no longer afford the taxes here?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I’m not leaving this place. I already told you that.
WHAT THE FLIES SAY AT NIGHT: David, David, David.
NUMBER OF RESIDENTS IN OUR TOWN: 600.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE WITH HUNTING LICENSES: 100.
NUMBER OF FLIES IN OUR HOUSE: Probably 6,000.
NUMBER OF FIELDS ON OUR PROPERTY: 5. The front field, the field to the pond, the middle field, the fern field, the back field. The pond is frozen now, but it is spring-fed and still the water bubbles up from it. We have told the children to stay off it, but Nelly, the Newfoundland, sometimes walks across it and we hold our breaths, scared she will break through the ice and drown. We had a beaver in our pond, and he chewed down seven of our trees that surrounded the pond. In the warmer months, the trees that the beaver felled are visible as they lay submerged at the bottom of the pond. I have put on my wet suit from my days of riding ocean waves and waded into the pond and tried to pull out the trees that I could-the small, thinner ones, but the larger trees I have had to leave where they are, with brown algae growing on their bark.
NUMBER OF TIMES I’VE LOOKED AT THE LIST OF ONE HUNDRED NAMES OF LICENSED HUNTERS: 60.
NUMBER OF TIMES MY WIFE HAS TOLD ME TO PUT IT AWAY: 10.
NUMBER OF MARKS WHO HAVE LICENSES: 3.
NUMBER OF JASONS: 3.
NUMBER OF CALEBS: 1.
NAME THAT ISN’T ON THE LICENSE LIST: Greg Springer.
WHAT NELLY TELLS BRUCE, WHO IS TRYING TO MOUNT HER: Not yet, you brute!
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: If we really want puppies we have to hire someone who helps breed dogs and this someone has to masturbate the dog.
WHAT I SAY: I am not spending money on hiring someone to come masturbate my dog. I know how to masturbate, for Chrissakes. I’ll do it for him.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Oh, that is soo disgusting.
WHAT BRUCE LIKES: Me masturbating him wearing rubber surgical gloves and holding a Ziploc freezer bag nearby to catch what I can whenever it comes spurting out, reminding me of my own days when I donated sperm.
WHAT DOESN’T GET HARD: Bruce.
