One night a house suddenly rose up from the ground and went floating through the air. It was dark, & it is said that a swishing, rushing noise was heard as it flew through the air. The house had not yet reached the end of its road when the people inside begged it to stop. So the house stopped.
They had no blubber when they stopped. So they took soft, freshly drifted snow & put it in their lamps, & it burned.
They had come down at a village. A man came to their house & said: Look, they are burning snow in their lamps. Snow can burn.
But the moment these words were uttered, the lamp went out.
(as told by Inugpasugjuk)
* * *
…
Exams are over, but there are still a few students lingering on campus. A girl whose name I forget comes into the library to shoot the breeze. She has brought me one of those healthy juices she likes to drink. It tastes like a shake made of cut grass. There is powdered bee pollen in it too and this allegedly protects the drinker from all manner of ruinous things.
She tells me that her phone was stolen and she’s been using a really old one instead. She won’t get the newest model, she’s decided. “So I just go at a slower pace. I know I’m missing things because I can’t respond quickly enough to what people say or show me, but that’s okay. It gives me more time to think,” she says.
I am charmed by her. She seems practically like a transcendentalist. I take another sip of her grass drink and think maybe it is giving me some kind of burst of energy.
She takes out her phone to demonstrate its obsolescence to me. It is exactly the same kind as mine. Mine is two years old but still retrieves things for me in the blink of an eye.
“Wait,” I say. “Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?” She considers this. “Yeah,” she says, “seconds probably.”
I take the car service home because I’m ridiculous. Mr. Jimmy is complaining about how “that company” is ruining his business. For some reason he won’t say the name, but I know who he is talking about. He came over here from Ireland as a teenager; twenty-five years he’s been driving, he says. “They don’t even check out the people they use. It’s just anyone with a semi-new car.” I have heard this, I tell him. There is even some case where a passenger said the driver assaulted her. He gives me a quick look. “Right,” he says. “No standards.”
Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims.
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
* * *
…
It’s my birthday tomorrow. “Now you are officially middle-aged,” says my coworker who carries around the X-rays. She has never liked me because I don’t have a proper degree. Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods.
Lorraine has organized an after-work celebration. We go to that bar where I used to work. It’s called the Burrow and it’s well named. Dark and small and warm. And my friend Tracy is here to pour us extra stiff drinks. I decide to drink gimlets because it’s more festive.
We catch up a little. She is six months into dating a handsome, horrible guy who lives in Philadelphia. She details his moments of cruelty, punctuating the story with little laughs. “And then I drove all the way there to see him even though it terrifies me to drive in traffic.”
When she got there, he had left a note on the door saying he had to go out of town unexpectedly. Let yourself in, the note said, but he’d only talked of, never followed through with, giving her a key.
“You need someone kind,” I say.
Something in her eyes then, something hard to read. Finally, it registers. She feels sorry for me and for all the rest who have thrown in their lot with kindness and decency. “Sure, sure, I suppose I could go for someone safe,” she says. “But I’ve never felt like this before. Never.”
But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?
When we worked together years ago, she always told me I had no game. She said this because allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring. Do you, did you, will you? I just want to know.
I offer her some birthday cake. She goes into the usual bit about temptation and sinfulness and maybe this and maybe that, and we have to go through every station of the fucking cross before she takes a bite of it. “That was delicious,” she says, then hustles off to make some drinks. I’m on number five, I think. Maybe six.
Let’s pause here.
But I don’t, I don’t. Now I’m talking to everyone at the bar. I’m telling stories, good ones at first, then not so good as the night wears on. If only I’d remembered that old proverb:
When three people say you are drunk, go to sleep.
Because the fact that there are six thousand miles of New York sewers and all of them lie well below sea level has become my go-to conversational gambit.
In the morning, my head is pounding. There is a tableful of presents. There are waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Also, Ben stayed up late sharpening pencils he found under the couch. He set aside the nicest ones for me. I am pleased to put them in my backpack. Especially this red one I thought I’d never see again.
* * *
…
Mr. Jimmy notices I am limping. He tells me that his adult son became disabled through no fault of his own. “No fault of his own,” he repeats. “It breaks your heart,” he says, and I agree.
I try to reach Sylvia as I wait for the bell. “I have to call you back,” she says. “I’m about to send off this article, but I have to come up with the obligatory note of hope.”
It’s stupidly hot out. I stand there, sweating in my black T-shirt. Amira’s mother is right next to me. You have to try, Eli told me yesterday. You have to ask. It’s almost summer and he’s getting scared. How will he see her? Where does she even live?