Zakhariye longs for more. He would give anything to have that rush again. Independent of his intelligent, rational mind, he watches his hand, the one clutching the razor, move toward his face. He runs the middle finger of his other hand along his chin in search of another bump. When he finds one just under his jawbone, he rests the blade on it, relishing the moment before the skin ruptures. With a quick gesture he drags the blade over it and feels the bump open. A guttural scream escapes him. This time what he feels is sheer pain minus the exhilaration that accompanied the first cut. Disappointment, as with everything else in his life, sullies the whole enterprise.
He wants to find another bump to see if he can re-experience, recapture, the bliss of the first nick, but his nerves fail him. Maybe tomorrow, he thinks, regarding himself in the mirror, maybe tomorrow.
Gregory Christiansen has never been in a bowling alley. Less than an hour ago he stood in a hospital waiting room where a kind, soft-spoken doctor told him that his wife of thirty-nine years was dead. Now he finds himself in a rundown bowling alley whose geographical location in the city is a mystery to him and how exactly he got there an even bigger riddle.
He remembers leaving the hospital waiting room, desperate to get out of the building as if by escaping the scene he could somehow erase the fact that the centre of his life around which he and the rest of his family congregated has vanished. Gregory also recalls getting lost in the hospital and ending up in the surgery wing where a willowy Ethiopian-looking nurse in scrubs stopped him, telling him he shouldn’t be there and pointing him in the direction of the elevator. Then there was the sensation of finally rushing out of the building and the cold, damp air hitting his face. But that is where his memories end.
Gregory doesn’t remember getting into his car, if he did, or what made him come into this place, since he has never had a desire to enter a bowling alley. He also doesn’t recollect paying at the counter or sitting on one of the blue-and-white chairs to put on the silly shoes he is wearing now, which make the ground beneath his feet shaky and untrustworthy.
Much to Gregory’s annoyance some loud people two lanes down are relentlessly teasing one another. The unruly bowlers are likely office co-workers on a team-building excursion to get acquainted outside their usual roles and duties. Just as Gregory gets ready to roll the ball on the long, narrow strip in front of him, the place explodes into sudden, shrill cheers coming from the noisy bowlers, making Gregory miss the pins by a mile. Never stopping to consider that his failure to topple any of the pins might have more to do with the fact that he has never bowled before, he shoots an angry, self-righteous glare in their direction much like the ones he and his wife used to aim at chatty couples who always sat next to them whenever they went to a stage play, which was often.
He glowers at one of the rowdy bowlers — a fifty-something woman with blond hair so puffed up it resembles an actual beehive. She shoots him a screw-you look. Gregory returns to his solitary game, convinced that if he had a quiet moment to concentrate, he would be able to knock over the pins before him. They seem to mock him, as if they, too, are involved in a vast conspiracy against him.
Gregory wants to ask them why of all the bowling alleys in the world this flock of office nobodies had to invade this one in his hour of need. He desperately needs to flatten some pins as though that mere accomplishment has the power to put the rest of his life back together in a recognizable form, one that resembles the way the world was when his wife was still in it.
Taking a deep breath, his sausage-like thumb barely fitting in the hole of the navy blue ball, Gregory positions himself, making a great effort not to slip and slide in the unfamiliar shoes. As he is about to release the ball, a member of the raucous group executes a perfect shot, sending all the pins crashing. The successful bowler celebrates his triumph with a long chicken dance, complete with squawks in his opponent’s face. The man’s office comrades cheer him on loudly.
That’s it! Gregory thinks. A man can only be pushed so far, then it’s war.
Gregory drops the ball on the hardwood floor. It thuds so loudly that everyone turns to stare at him. He scurries over to the man doing the chicken dance. When he reaches the guy, he pushes him back with the open palms of both hands on the man’s thick chest, feeling the warm, cushy fat of the thick chest under the golf shirt. “Have you people no respect?” Gregory cries.
The other bowlers surround him, ready to protect their man. The chicken-dancing fellow stumbles backward under the force of Gregory’s fury, then yells, “What the fuck’s your problem, buddy?”
“Don’t call me buddy. I’m not your buddy. A little peace — that’s all I’m asking.” Gregory’s fists are now closed, ready for a fight. “I just want to bowl. Is that too goddamn much to ask?” He grabs the man by his shirt collar and shakes him. “I just want to be left alone. Why won’t you do that?”
Gregory is surprised and frightened by the secret source of strength that enables him to manhandle this beefy bowler like a rag doll. One of the men in the offending fellow’s group, fortyish with big arms and even bigger belly, seizes Gregory from behind and pulls him away, while one of the women, a black lady with large cornrows, shouts in a heavy Jamaican accent, “Oh, sweet Jesus, he gonna kill him! Patty, run, girl, and get security. Oh, sweet lord, he gonna kill him.”
The big-bellied guy yanks Gregory so hard that he loses his balance and falls to the floor. As Gregory struggles to get up, the chicken-dance man and his plump comrade push him back onto the floor, then sit on him. When Gregory hears boots pounding on the floor, he twists his head, presses a sweaty cheek against the cold, dusty floor, and spots two twenty-something security guards in black uniforms approaching.
“All I wanted to do was play,” Gregory tells the security guards as they extricate him from the tangle of limbs. “They wouldn’t let me play,” he says, practically sobbing. “Why won’t they let me play?” The guards ignore his questions as they hustle him out of the building.
As the security men drag him away, Gregory remembers how hopeful he felt early that morning when he drove to the hospital to continue reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence from where he had left off the previous day. He is astonished that he can recall the precise spot where he stopped reading to his wife — at the end of the scene after Newland Archer and Countess Olenska’s accidental meeting in Boston where Newland tells the countess, “You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment, you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring.”
Ella wanted him to continue reading, but when she shut her eyes, strength clearly waning, he closed the book and said, “Tomorrow, my dearest. We’ll continue tomorrow.” Then he chuckled. When his wife asked what was so funny, he lifted the book and told her, “Now you got me talking like one of them.”
His wife laughed, something that had become harder and harder to elicit from her in those last days. So, on the rare occasions when he made her smile or chuckle, he relished it. She said the chemotherapy made her tired and humourless, but he knew there was more to it. The end was nearing. They both realized that, but neither dared to acknowledge it.
When he parked his car in the hospital lot earlier today, he was eager to sit on the edge of her bed and resume their daily reading, perhaps even find out what happened to Newland and the countess. Gregory had learned to lower his expectations of what counted as a good day. That morning he walked into her room with a hopeful smile only to discover that Ella had gone into cardiac arrest and had been moved to the ICU where she perished alone.
“We perish each alone,” Gregory says aloud as he is hauled out of the bowling alley. Who said that? Where did he read that? He can’t remember. His desire to bowl, which was so strong, so all-consuming a few minutes ago, now seems small and ridiculous to him, causing him to howl with laughter.