It was good to have him around when all loveliness fled the earth a few years ago in Peoria, alone and unimpeded in the suite of a Super 8, humor extinct, solitude mortally plentiful, ten pills above the prescribed dosage awaiting orders on the nightstand like kamikaze bombers.
It was everything to see him at that teetering moment, when it was clear no one would be crashing into the room at the last minute, no friend or loved one desperately lowering their shoulder and breaking through the chain, which hadn’t been latched anyway.
They found him seventeen days later sitting at the end of the couch, flies all over him, three messages on the answering machine, two from work, one from a polling survey, the only mail in his box a misaddressed catalog and a MasterCard statement. Seventeen days before a neighbor, looking to get back a borrowed extension cord, peeked through the window and saw him, the .38 snoozing like a kitten on his lap, not a single door locked, not one curtain drawn, intervention welcomed at every entrance, unavailable.
Loneliness and confusion are less formidable than they used to be. I like fresh eggs in the morning and learning the names of trees. It’s hard to remember how self-annihilation ever looked fetching against the joy of a gooey cheddar omelet or a row of mountain aspens twitching silvery in the wind. Somehow it did.
The desolation is almost too miserable to imagine, but the mind knows what it must conjure to keep itself from painting the ceiling. On the last afternoon, alone and unimpeded in a house he’d never shared with anyone, he opened all the curtains, unlocked every door, ejected his sorrow through the roof of his skull, and, bearing every simple luscious pleasure surrendered to obscurity, burst screaming across a gap of years, into the suite of a Super 8, and made the bombers stand down.
