had nothing to say until losing his voice left him desperate to speak, though speak of what to whom with which vocables he didn’t know. He expected nothing to change until he expected nothing at all and then became free of expectations. Wherever he was whenever he was there, he saw strangers waiting to die, some knowing it, some not, others in disbelief because they were still waiting to live whether they knew it or not. He witnessed waiting, then waiting for something since waiting implied something to wait for, but mostly he sat and watched waiting for its own sake. To his surprise, he didn’t exude despair in his dealings with others, but patience and indulgence, until he was indulging in solicitude toward complete strangers. An elderly couple carried groceries from a grocery cart across the threshold of their doorway and then together lifted the empty cart inside. They did this expertly without exchanging a word or a glance as if they’d been doing it for decades. They hefted paper grocery bags one at a time into the interior of their apartment, where he could see a dim kitchen light above a sink and surrounding it cabinets painted sky blue because the room was small. Together they retrieved the cart from the doorway and, just inside the door, folded it. Closing the door, they saw him with alarm because he watched without moving a muscle. He stood still even after they closed the view to him, certain that they put away their groceries as satisfactorily as they’d achieved everything that came before it. Behaving as they did must have taken a lifetime to accomplish because he was exhausted after seeing them do it once since he took nothing for granted when it came to behavior. Then he swam for the first time in years, for the first time since by mistake he had swum among tiger sharks in a cove while his wife spread their picnic lunch and, seeing him duck below the surface, suddenly feared he’d lose a leg or worse, whatever would be worse to lose, a head say. She called him out of the water quietly and sweetly, even seductively so as not to alarm him, undoing the top of her bikini and revealing her breasts until in bewilderment he obeyed and took to the rocks where the nudity could be found. Once he did she burst into tears and punched the sternum of his chest.
Life without you would be inconceivable, she said, and by then the bra was back in place though her nipples erected in the fresh air. Possibly across the remaining years of their marriage his wife had learned to conceive the inconceivable. Swimming in the ocean for the first time in years, he encountered a woman who soon left to dry herself, invading the shade of an umbrella he’d rented for the occasion. He trembled at the thought of conversation because nothing suited the vocabulary of his mind, and even in the shade the heat defied thinking until not far from them a bird fell from a great height sounding like a rock landing on a rock when it hit the beach. Though fewer birds were falling in the drought, those that did fell from greater heights where they sought stronger sea breezes and the larger birds greater wind currents. No one could say if fewer birds fell because the drought was easing or if there were fewer birds to fall because the drought wasn’t. So the woman remarked that it depressed her children to see birds falling from the sky, sometimes onto a windshield or even onto the head of another child playing in a park. Plump, buxom, sprinkled with sand and lathered in lotion she indicated her children at the water’s edge.
I wish they’d just disappear, she said even though hers seemed happy healthy children playing in an ocean on a child’s idea of a beautiful day. Soon he realized that since he was a stranger, their mother told him the truth, and since it wasn’t his nature to disagree, they shared a moment of irresponsible intimacy. This woman despaired and because he didn’t console or dissuade her, she knew that he despaired too, that they shared a diminished language where life was concerned. He saw no possibility of love between them, but as they looked at each other in the heat of the day, he wondered if she wanted to be kissed in the shade of the umbrella to forget the afternoon or the evening to come or to make them bearable. He would have kissed her as another human being with no reason to go on living beside a throaty meaningless kiss shared with a stranger. She studied his face wondering if she could live with it day in and out or if anyone could or if anyone did until they shared the formidable recognition that nothing would occur to either of them to make life bearable and yet they would bear it. Thanks to her children and the husband who sired them, living her life wasn’t desirable anymore. They withheld no secrets by saying nothing so as not to lie and didn’t change anything because nothing could change anything for either of them—the darkest secret they shared as they were looking at the pores of each other’s skin, though hers were hidden by zinc oxide and a highway of sand along the forehead. Looking at the pores of each other’s skin, they would never be lovers, but they might have been made to love each other and if so might not have despaired for the rest of their lives if only they’d kissed in front of her children. For an instant he imagined her hairless and nude from head to foot, but immediately doubted their love since she might have deceived him as she would be deceiving her husband to be with him so that if she ever announced her intention of going to the beach in the heat of the day he could assume she would confess to a stranger whom she was kissing that she despaired of life with her husband, though while he was her lover she expected never to despair again. Eventually she gathered the unwanted children and waved clubby fingers from the shore, walking along the ocean’s edge in search of a place to drown them and herself on another day. He considered her husband’s existence and felt less sanguine about their encounter since despair endures as love doesn’t because despair resists temptation or it isn’t despair but optimism in disguise. Then he wondered if she had meant that she wished the dying birds would disappear, not her children. Living in despair all day every day, he foresaw life relieved of doubt or dilemma, exempt from the drama of personal existence, a life of nothing other than moods emerging and receding until nothing remained but the end of his moods with the end of everything that emerged before receding and then receding forever into nothing, the nothing that lasts forever as the woman he loved receded and receded over and over until there was nowhere left to go the way the ocean receded over and over because there was nowhere left to go.
