driver. You couldn’t do the actual thing, in all honesty, because you don’t have the wherewithal, but you could think it, you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”
There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.
He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.
There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home, alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was nearly hidden, something he knew but only barely, a whisper of self-disclosure.
The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.
“It helps me go slow when I think,” Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count.
It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look.
He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel . Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.
There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.
“We go home now,” Justin
There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.
He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.
There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home, alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was nearly hidden, something he knew but only barely, a whisper of self-disclosure.
The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.
“It helps me go slow when I think,” Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count.
It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look.
He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel . Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.
There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.
“We go home now,” Justin
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