The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney

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СКАЧАТЬ takes turns calling the dance as the record plays behind. Mrs. Gottlieb smiles demurely. As he turns and pivots, his hand light and chary on hers, the opportunity is such that he can contemplate what would be so awful about a degree of relenting, some sort of acknowledgment that he just seems to be going on and on, and that some sort of plan does not invite the wrath of indeterminate gods.

      “Percy, did you used to be a cowboy?” Mrs. Gottlieb says flirtatiously, and he can feel himself flush.

      “Only tonight,” Percy says. “Only tonight.”

      He can feel himself relaxing into something, a thought he rarely allows himself. That he might become friendly with a woman (these ladies, many of whom had no idea who he was, seem surprised and enthralled with his British accent: Tillie, he tawks just like Cary Grant!), and in that friendliness that he could begrudge himself some time in the world with some company, no matter how overdue he has become.

      They dance on, changing partners, reconnecting, then veering off to the farther reaches of the Ocean Breeze clubhouse. Every so often, the needle skips on the square-dance record, and Eileen or Nancy from Staff interrupts their hand-clapping to push the tonearm forward, making everybody on the dance floor go into a momentary convulsive step to reposition their feet to match the beat. As it begins to feel as if the record will never end, Percy can feel the screaming need for his lungs to find more air. He is in a situation.

      He can see Mrs. Gottlieb looking at him with a face turning toward horror. Ocean Breeze is not a stranger to various heart attacks, aneurysms, and simple weary passing, but not at a square dance—more often, people simply stay unmoving in their lawns chairs until someone notices they’re still sitting out there in the dark. Keeling over at an Ocean Breeze social is, for the most part, simply not done.

      Time has funneled down to that pointy notion, one in which he has to consider the idea that he is not going to make it through this dance, through the next lap of the second hand; but he wants to, wants so badly to complete this act and by doing so move toward the moment after that, in which something might be said, or ventured. The lungs feel as if they can seduce no oxygen at all. He wants, so much, to go on.

      He cannot. He pushes off from Mrs. Gottlieb, whose face is instantly flushed and hurt, and he tries to maintain a controlled walk toward the fire exit. Pushing through, he is in open air, pulling hard into his lungs, his shrunken-leather lungs curled up under his ribs like dead leaves. He is alone in the dark, gasping in his pain, defeated once again, surviving once again.

       11. Particular memory that presents itself on a somewhat recurrent basis

      It starts at Rotherham, in that little recuperative bed, first as a flash of reconstitution. The first shards of the pieced memory, the most obvious things primary: the noise, the fear, the swimming struggle of body inside woolen uniform, of boots falling away under the vortical mud as it sucks around his puttees, the crush of his own gear holding him to the ground.

      As the years go on, the dreams (Are memories really dreams, if they do not concoct things that have not happened?) seem to bleed of certain colors and retain in them the more structural elements: the swerving search for Wesley, never realized in the first breach of gas in its benign entry, not understood; the horizon of dead and dying, infinitely—yes, that, the faces and bodies in their dour uniformity, woolen forms bogged in their muck, cries of anguish, the sense in it all that the air has gone from the world.

      And then, in old age, the reckoning. The burying of the dead, all of them, fields of them, the burying of the sense that this moment is ever resolvable—ever, possibly, somehow—by its nightly screening in his mind’s recesses. Somewhere out here at the end of the line, they begin to recede, as if time has run out on all of them but him.

       12. The outcome of situations that can only be planned to a certain extent

      After Martha’s funeral, he writes letters North to explain what has happened, and receives letters back that console and outrage him: For the best; Not a surprise; Gone to a better place . . . No one has come down but, on the other hand, no one was invited, none of these people grown so distant from him and Martha in the tightly circumvallated world. They cannot understand how he depended on her, even as he spooned food into her drooping mouth and carried her to the bathtub, her shrunken gossamer body. You must be relieved . . . It must have been a burden . . .

      In the weeks after Martha has gone, Percy can only feel the sting of the fact, the moment: that their whole plan, the entire map of how it would be, has proven false. Him, standing over freshly turned soil, over the wife who would doubtlessly live on. Him, standing in the brilliant sunshine as his Martha settles into her darkness. Him, impossibly like this.

       13. Some faint relief as provided by the carefully circumscribed art of the square dance

      He hears someone coming out to get him. Staff tends to keep a wary eye, but what he hears is a man’s harrumphing breaths, behind him. None other than Cap’n Irv.

      “Bub . . . So you didn’t die, then,” Cap’n Irv says.

      “Close, though,” Percy whispers.

      “Really? I was only joking.”

      “Oh.”

      “Well, don’t worry, Mrs. Gottlieb will be okay.”

      “What happened to her?”

      “You put her on the floor, Percy.”

      “Oh, good God.”

      “Staff checked her. She’s fine. She landed softly. Those hips of hers.”

      “How horribly embarrassing, really though.”

      Cap’n Irv comes around to stand face-to-face with Percy, even though they are both in the dark.

      “I didn’t ever insult you, did I?”

      “No, not at all.”

      “You should come by sometime,” he says. “I’ll mix you a drink. You can entertain the ladies.”

      “I’ve made a complete fool of myself.”

      “Maybe, but I doubt it. I think all in all, it went well. One small moment, is all. You’ve been in a war, what the hell’s anything else?”

      Percy thinks about this. “Can’t really believe I got this far.”

      “You and me both.”

      They stand there nodding their whitened heads in the sultry darkness.

      “Mrs. Gottlieb is owed restitution,” Cap’n Irv says, and not without a lascivious air.

       14. The one moment of all that must always remain most considered

      He goes slower now, slower even than the slow swirl of a bunch of elderly square-dancing Floridians, slower than the record allows. A couple of dozen people, letting the music get ahead of them, no one mentioning that they are all simply waiting up for a man whose lungs betray him, always. Mrs. Gottlieb swings on his arm, smiling, unruffled by the past, the near past, or the rest of the past.

      Strangers, all of them, a world of strangers that spread outside his door. But the touch of them is real, and they huff and wheeze as he does, and he somehow, СКАЧАТЬ