Read Online The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan - Free Book Online

bedside table, flipping ardently through its pages. Naturally, she’d verify each hypothesis with recurrent appointments. Anna liked her doctor and his magazines, his lemon drops, and his pristine coats. Liked him enough to forgive his misidentification of her symptoms as “psychologically derivative.” Liked him enough to agree to volunteer at the city library’s Visually Impaired Assistance Program for “purpose and routine.”
    * * *
    On a Monday at 4:28 P.M. , Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door. It was the same knock she knocked every week for twelve weeks—like she knew he knew she was already there. Her knee hurt and the building elevator was under renovation, so the two flights of stairs added a glisten to her forehead and a rhythm to her breathing. She hated herself for it. Back when her back could bend and her toes could point, Anna could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant without moistening her leotard—spinning and tucking on a single slipper. Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. The was haunted her from mirror to mirror in her Westchester high-rise. People used to stare at her, envy her, pay seven dollars to watch her grand jeté at the Metropolitan Opera House. But not Sam. Sam never watched her do anything. So twice a week, Anna didn’t watch herself. His place had no mirrors and even his fogged eyes were unreflective. So when he opened his door, she focused on his face.
    “Hi Anna,” said Sam.
    “Hi Sam,” said Anna. He reached forward, placing a hand on her elbow in his standard gesture of greeting.
    “Your knee doing okay?”
    “Well, not really.” She stepped forward, swinging the door shut behind her. “They just don’t know about these things these days. Might be pulmonary tuberculosis. They just don’t know.” She shook her head. “There’s a large brace on it right now, actually.”
    There wasn’t a large brace on it, actually, but Anna liked the way it sounded. She also liked Sam.
    Sam hadn’t always been blind; he’d managed a whole two years before the fog came. His visual memory puzzled him, tricked him, disillusioned him. Trapped him with a visual arsenal of table bottoms and grown-ups’ feet, forever restricting him from the bipedal perspective. He was a master’s student in a divinity school just outside the city, and at night, in the black, he moved about his apartment, tracing his fingers across the thousands of tiny dots of Jacob and Isaiah, Luke and Matthew. Fingering the Psalms and stroking the Gospels. “Religious Studies,” he would clarify to friends and uncles and the women like Anna who read to him. “I study God, not worship Him.”
    Sam’s apartment lived an immaculate life. Clutter was more than an inconvenience—it was a hazard. Anna walked by the Bibles and Torahs and Korans convened with books on Indian cooking and music theory in alphabetized rows of Ikea shelving. He’d built them himself. Felt every screw and every piece of artificial wood, sliding them together as Anna read him the instructions during one of her first visits. Everything had a location. Every utensil had its hook and every coat had its hanger. Tiny blue dotted labels speckled the apartment like some kind of laboratory. The microwave buttons, the light switches, the drawers, the cans: all had their names displayed in bright Braille blue. A Malaysian tapestry hung above the sofa and an Andy Warhol print hung opposite the door. “For company,” he shrugged when Anna asked. “My mother’s idea.”
    “Well, sit down, sit down!” He gestured to the exact spot of her usual armchair, turned forty-five degrees to the left, and took six paces before stopping in front of the counter. “I’ve got a lot for you today.”
    “I think I can handle it,” she said.
    “Anna, Anna.” He mocked distress. “What would I possibly do without you?”
    “You know perfectly well they’d just send someone else by.”
    Sam smiled as he placed his pile