Hell-o.
This on?
Think I’m hearin me. Me.
This reverbin either in the buildin or in my head. Whatever. Ha.
Nobody listnin anyways right?
Hell-o.
This on?
Think I’m hearin me. Me.
This reverbin either in the buildin or in my head. Whatever. Ha.
Nobody listnin anyways right?
I finished it even before I went through passport control, really I finished it at JFK. It was in my hand while the man asked me questions, but I had already read the end, in line. When I shut the book, for a minute I was satisfied, or self-satisfied, you might say, because it was a long flight, and I had accomplished that, at least.
When I was a boy we lived out in Mosfellsbaer, in the valley between Mount Esja and the hill we called Langahlið. It was only my mother and me in a small cement house; my father had moved in with his other family. Next to the house there was a small pool, called a kettle pond, of a type common in Iceland: round and deep, left over after a chunk of glacier melted. It had no inlet or outlet except the sky.
She had a way of winning people over. If this did not happen quickly there was a danger that her mind, set on rapid success, would thwart her; she would then have displayed her impatience, the interruption of her journey to self-realization would have shown on her face as nervousness and diminished the charm of her appearance.
In cloud without warning a passenger jet flew head-on into the side of a mountain, all fifty-three aboard perishing. Neither pilot had time to register the change of state, lucky for them. The abrupt near-vertical rock face misled the altimeter according to the black box, perhaps in a freak downdraft, with impact shortly before 5:07 a.m., just pre-dawn.
She was still beautiful. It wasn’t some phase or some hand me down, it was a decision and if you disagreed with that or any other decision they made, possibly one with greater ramifications, though she tended to think that one’s taste in furnishings and silverware was a pretty big deal, then that was it.
This story takes place in a garden. I have great affection for gardens, and this one was no exception. It was more of a backyard than a garden, but it had a number of mature crab apple trees flaunting vivid pink blossoms. Beneath the back porch light, daffodils were rioting; my hostess’s young guests were beautiful and eager to get drunk.
My father is in the water again.
He is treading in front of me, a snorkel in his mouth, his mask filled with fog. He watches me for a moment and then dives down, disappearing at the edge of the drop off.
I don’t know how the tradition started, but that whole year Fred and I never cooked dinner on Tuesdays. Word must have gone around that we treated our bach- elors well because there was never any difficulty securing one. One year, fifty-two Tuesdays, fifty-two men we convinced to cook dinner for us.
He walked in slowly and he was stooping, not too much but just a bit, and he said abruptly and in his monotonous tone, don’t worry if I’m not walking straight I’m just a whiff tired, no, not too much but I have something to tell you, to ask you, it’s maybe not an important thing, but in fact it does matter to me that we discuss this thing together because you know Alissia, and she knows you, you may convince her, I have already told her but she didn’t listen, she never does, I never figured out in what kind of a world she lives, now suddenly she’s bizarre, not the Mom I always had, or that I thought I had, and it doesn’t matter, we’re going through a crisis, a serious crisis, the first huge happening between the two of us since my father died and God bless his soul.