1.
Suddenly, he is here, sitting at a table, an uncrumpled piece of paper pinned by his elbows. Chin in hands. A benign hum playing the chambers of his heart.
Nothing seems to mean anything. Like he woke up in a dream and all the familiar things of his life are but holograms to that same benign hum. It looks like his kitchen, with the large round oak table, the silver mermaid painting, the shelving with its series of international cookbooks. His things. But what does that mean, and who is he, anyway?
Something startles him. A fat moth flying around the lamp in the center of the table, bumping into and off of the orange lamp shade, as orange as the setting sun.
He looks down at the paper. A drawing of a raven on a naked branch. A penciled list of names and numbers. A graph highlighted by peaks and valleys and ending with a phrase written in his handwriting. “The asymptote ends here.”
He speaks the phrase out loud, as if to summon an anchor, but he trips over the word “asymptote” and an ancient argument rocks through him like a tide. Slow motion violence against slick glass sand. Inherited footprints dissolving. He looks at his hand and breathes into the palm. “Is this life?” The moth like a soft motor that burns without fire. Humming the air.
“Or is it a trap,” he says suddenly aware of this distinct possibility.
He balls up the paper with a disgust he doesn’t understand.
“Where’s the definition,” he says, as if its buried treasure he’s asking about, or misplaced keys, or a constellation he was taught about in some lost childhood. Things to be found.
He walks over to the wood stove, which has burned down to just a few barely living coals, and tosses the paper inside.
A smoldering. A sly tongue of flame issues from the coals and consumes the paper. He feels a vague something in his chest like an itch followed by a purr and nothing. He looks around the fireplace for wood to add, but there is none, only the crumbs of wood spread out over the carpet like the leftover feast from a passing army of termites.
He hears the phone ringing and wonders if it just started or if it’s always been ringing. He knows himself well enough how his mind can forget about the world around him even as he studies the details of each crack and the hue of every halo. He smiles and the ringing continues and the smile fades upon the feeling like he’s missed an important class, the most important of his life and now because he’s missed it, his life can never really start.
“Don’t stop ringing,” he calls out, searching for the phone. “Where did I leave you?” he says, unable to locate with his ears, it’s direction. He looks on the futon against the wall, under the futon, next to the Conga drums, on the counter with the mason jar filled with quarters and the phone ringing and ringing and ringing…
“The answering machine”, he fumes, throwing pillows, knocking over bookshelves, toppling spice racks “there’s always a machine…” turning over the couch, “that answers…”
2.
Time passes the way time passes in a dream. The invisible phone ringing like the phone is nowhere and everywhere all at once, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the air.
Like everything is a hologram of the ringing.
Furniture reduced to rubble and kindling, the television caved in, the stereo beaten to a pile of metal shards. Sawdust in his haggard beard, his knuckles bruised and scabbed over, his breathing like a clogged vacuum tube.
He returns at last to the wood stove, remembering the paper with its graph of peaks and valleys. The raven, the names and numbers.
“If only I hadn't thrown it into the fire, if only I had learned to read it, I might have been able to… ”
But there is nothing more to say. He climbs inside the stove, rear-end first, enduring with a grown through clenched teeth, the cracking of his spine, the sharp light of effort bursting through his back and spidering through his entire body. The x and y axis bending at the waist, to almost join as one.
“There are no rational functions,” he groans at the merciless ringing, and closes the iron door.
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