Please. Thank you. Preceding or preceded by a transaction with some anonymous servant of convenience, and occasionally involving as well a few other words in the form of a request.
For days, sometimes weeks, little more in the way of human conversation. His voice was disppearing further down his throat by the day. He would find himself reading out loud, if only to convince himself –or try to– that the authors of the books he lived surrounded by were actively communicating with him, that there was a real relationship of sorts involved in the act of reading, that these mostly dead people and their mostly fictional creations were true companions and friends, and not merely the babysitters of his disappearing self.
His nose was running; he needed a tissue.
There were places he might go, but he was not entirely convinced of this possibility, was not, in fact, convinced of any sort of possibility at all. Still, there was a great deal of water out there, somewhere close by, that he might look at if he ever felt so inclined.
He kept waiting to hear from you, ‘you’ meaning the ever more distant constellation of his old friends and acquaintances. He had somehow slipped from his orbit, and felt himself hurtling toward some ultimate collision. There was a chance, he supposed, that he would burn up and fall apart before gravity finally laid him out for good.
Meanwhile, he would order things, to give himself something to look forward to, the occasional package in the mail that would provide some important acknowledgment that he was still, however ambivalently, among the living.
He had become one of those people who wrote things above urinals in public restrooms, and who had taken to carrying a Sharpie in his pocket for exactly this purpose. He was not, however, prepared to disclose the sorts of things he felt compelled to scribble in moments of terrible rage and weakness.
Every night, in the dead hours, he would be startled awake, terrified.
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