Public Radio

She remembered talking to a friend the other day about some guy on NPR who was angry about the way we speak of Africa; of billions of people living on a dollar a day. “He said, ‘It’s more like billions of people dying on a dollar a day.’” She thought about that while she was in the shower and the water got in her mouth and she realized it was drinkable and felt terribly guilty about that. Terribly guilty about everything. This was before the thunderstorm started and it became completely dark in her apartment, which was tiny and pitiful by the measure of most other apartments she had seen in her new city. It didn’t bother her now that she had stopped trying to have guests. It had stopped being a place to enjoy with others. Now, having accepted its true purpose, she knew it was a place to be alone. Like an animal.

The thunderstorm had dulled the sky a bit but the main source of darkness was the heavy curtaining obscuring a wall of large windows, really the only good thing about the place. They were never closed, not even when night sounds carried up from the street and made her think someone could see in. She had finally closed them because the building was undergoing masonry work and the scaffolding would soon fill the view, meshing over the windows like a big green nest, and turn her one room into a fishbowl for construction workers, those crotch-grabbing spiders. She had to keep all the windows closed, on top of that, lest the stone dust blow in. So it was sweltering and dim. But the curtains had to stay closed. Thinking about waking up, these slow horrible mornings lately full of heart-stopping anxiety, self-recrimination, inertia, and–after hours of it–a violent breaking-free of the bed, sloughing out of the sheets like oil from a pore, staring at the clock and hating herself, just feeling constant helpless rage at herself, thinking about this being witnessed by anyone was too much to bear. It was one thing to describe it to her nurse, the only person she suspected would always be patient with her. And to her best friend, to whom she paid such tithes in being-there-for and helping-always that she felt an uneasy entitlement to murmur a narrative of this daily struggle through a throat that was painfully constricted with humiliation.

Even this was unacceptable, though, as it made her remind herself of a character in a David Foster Wallace novella. Almost everything that could happen or be imagined reminded her of something she had seen or read, and it was in this way that most of her life was probably ruined. (Whether this ruination had been enacted through a too-keen ability to see the threads of references creating everyday experience or actually through reading too many books she often wondered. The wondering of which reminded her of Borges.) Last night at a fundraiser a man like a paper doll of a gay man had insistently repeated that “We put our parents in nice nursing homes for us, not for them,” and she knew that he had seen the movie The Savages, had found the line striking, and was now determined to have the same impact on others. It bothered her that, as he failed at this, he would assume the stolen bon mot was simply too insightfully urbane for his crowd, when here she was sitting silently calling his bluff and feeling ashamed for him. She was aware that her hatred of people in these moments was unreasonable, but it still lit up her shyness inside. These moments were so passionately internal that she would sometimes get a loud ringing buzz in her ears as if her brain was trying to protect itself from becoming angrier, but she would not even show the slightest flush of temper. This is the world of shy people, she thought. This undetectable angry impotence.

During these periods her cat thought she was sick. It would curl extra-close to her, even in the heat, and watch her with its sharp metallic eyes. It would lick her arms and hands one or two times, reassuringly, as if to tell her that she would be well again. For some reason this always made her want to cry, and today she did, miserably, hot tears in the stuffy little room. Making little gasps of self-sorrowing-sorrow under the drum of thunder and the fan’s dumb hum, she felt no right to unhappiness, but rather that unhappiness was making an unforgivable mistake.