least expensive.
Sincerely,
Andrew Whittaker
¶
Dear Jolie,
Mama’s dead. I feel utterly unbereft. And yet I can’t stop thinking of her. Little things, like her passion for the 1812 Overture and the hideous yellow pants she wore to play golf.
I got the fire inspector’s report today. It was arson, as I thought from the beginning. It seems the fire started in four different places at more or less the same time. Those fellows are quite cunning, the way they can go through a pile of charred wood and brick and come up with a plausible story. If I could go through the ruins of my life and come up with a plausible story, we’d be in business. Furthermore the whole Brud family has disappeared. I can see that big homely woman striding through the house with a blowtorch, blasting a spot here, a spot there, while the little toad-like husband hops behind her croaking, “Darling, are you sure this is a good idea?” I’ve come to expect very little of people, but this is a family that I went out of my way to be kind to. The clouds of ingratitude rain fire upon us. Is that it?
Love,
Andy
¶
In the desert. A woman with two men. A man with two women. A boy, one of the crowd of children, is lying on his back in the hot sand, sweltering in his dark-blue sailor suit. A man and a woman look down at him, eyes filled with pity, and then glance quickly at each other. The boy will remember this later. He will recall that glance as somehow “inestimably peculiar.” The man is the man with two women. The woman is the woman with two men. A complex web is being woven. There is also a woman with a cat, and two women with one dog. They fight. The man and the woman who had been looking down at the boy, it could be a lifetime ago, draw apart from the others, to stand together, but not touching, on the sandy bank of the river. Behind them, sounds of continuous quarreling. Looking out at the water, speaking to the man, though not turning her head to face him, the woman says in a voice without inflection, and yet, for this very reason, charged with meaning, “Through the desert of tedium flows a river of dread.” Horrified, the man realizes that this is true.
¶
Dear Harold,
You are probably right, I
am
working too hard. It’s difficult to keep things in proportion sometimes. Like everyone else I have my up days and down days. But I discern a trend: the trend is downward. I always used to have an orderly mind, never put things in jars without labels, and would scold Jolie for keeping important papers under magnets on the refrigerator. I hated opening the door and having some unpaid bill or vital phone number sail loopingly off in the direction of the floor, sometimes in a slanting dive that would send it slithering beneath the refrigerator from whence it would have to be extracted with a broom handle. I sometimes had difficulty containing my rage when this happened, if Jolie was not home and I had to be the one to get down on my knees and bang about with the broom. I finally had no choice but to take all the magnets off.
Furthermore, I always had files. Whatever wasn’t filed in a labeled folder in one of five metal cabinets (in drawers I kept so well oiled they slid in and out with scarcely a whisper) was filed in my mind in tiny cabinets arranged along the walls of my skull. I always at every instant of the day knew exactly where my toothbrush or my copy of
Tropic of Cancer
was. I wanted something, I had only to put out my hand and grab it. So how is it possible that I have started losing things left and right? That is not in keeping with my character. You surely remember my character. I have a tidy nature. You remember how tidy I kept our dorm room. You remember how I made you stand on the bed while I mopped the floor. I’m afraid something organic is going on in my brain, due perhaps to a severe lack of oxygen. The brain uses twenty percent of the body’s total supply of oxygen. That’s a lot more than one would think,
Sincerely,
Andrew Whittaker
¶
Dear Jolie,
Mama’s dead. I feel utterly unbereft. And yet I can’t stop thinking of her. Little things, like her passion for the 1812 Overture and the hideous yellow pants she wore to play golf.
I got the fire inspector’s report today. It was arson, as I thought from the beginning. It seems the fire started in four different places at more or less the same time. Those fellows are quite cunning, the way they can go through a pile of charred wood and brick and come up with a plausible story. If I could go through the ruins of my life and come up with a plausible story, we’d be in business. Furthermore the whole Brud family has disappeared. I can see that big homely woman striding through the house with a blowtorch, blasting a spot here, a spot there, while the little toad-like husband hops behind her croaking, “Darling, are you sure this is a good idea?” I’ve come to expect very little of people, but this is a family that I went out of my way to be kind to. The clouds of ingratitude rain fire upon us. Is that it?
Love,
Andy
¶
In the desert. A woman with two men. A man with two women. A boy, one of the crowd of children, is lying on his back in the hot sand, sweltering in his dark-blue sailor suit. A man and a woman look down at him, eyes filled with pity, and then glance quickly at each other. The boy will remember this later. He will recall that glance as somehow “inestimably peculiar.” The man is the man with two women. The woman is the woman with two men. A complex web is being woven. There is also a woman with a cat, and two women with one dog. They fight. The man and the woman who had been looking down at the boy, it could be a lifetime ago, draw apart from the others, to stand together, but not touching, on the sandy bank of the river. Behind them, sounds of continuous quarreling. Looking out at the water, speaking to the man, though not turning her head to face him, the woman says in a voice without inflection, and yet, for this very reason, charged with meaning, “Through the desert of tedium flows a river of dread.” Horrified, the man realizes that this is true.
¶
Dear Harold,
You are probably right, I
am
working too hard. It’s difficult to keep things in proportion sometimes. Like everyone else I have my up days and down days. But I discern a trend: the trend is downward. I always used to have an orderly mind, never put things in jars without labels, and would scold Jolie for keeping important papers under magnets on the refrigerator. I hated opening the door and having some unpaid bill or vital phone number sail loopingly off in the direction of the floor, sometimes in a slanting dive that would send it slithering beneath the refrigerator from whence it would have to be extracted with a broom handle. I sometimes had difficulty containing my rage when this happened, if Jolie was not home and I had to be the one to get down on my knees and bang about with the broom. I finally had no choice but to take all the magnets off.
Furthermore, I always had files. Whatever wasn’t filed in a labeled folder in one of five metal cabinets (in drawers I kept so well oiled they slid in and out with scarcely a whisper) was filed in my mind in tiny cabinets arranged along the walls of my skull. I always at every instant of the day knew exactly where my toothbrush or my copy of
Tropic of Cancer
was. I wanted something, I had only to put out my hand and grab it. So how is it possible that I have started losing things left and right? That is not in keeping with my character. You surely remember my character. I have a tidy nature. You remember how tidy I kept our dorm room. You remember how I made you stand on the bed while I mopped the floor. I’m afraid something organic is going on in my brain, due perhaps to a severe lack of oxygen. The brain uses twenty percent of the body’s total supply of oxygen. That’s a lot more than one would think,
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