Retirement Projects

  Chapter 14

  I took a lot of long walks the next couple of days, over the hills and dales of San Francisco, examining my new status. I discovered during my teaching years that walking is a marvelous way to free up the brain. The buildings, the traffic, the people glide by effortlessly like the banks of a slow river on which you drift. Or you climb a hill and you can't think about much besides the laboring of your lungs; you go down the hill and there's the stress and slight pain in your knee joints to contemplate; you cross the boundaries between sunlight and shade, half-noticing the sudden temperature changes of San Francisco. And while this is happening, ideas and connections appear in your head, as if from nowhere, and drift along with you, growing and evolving as you walk.

  I wasn't bored or lonely any more; that was the most obvious thing. Arthur was like a new friend in my life, although he was a friend who might be contemplating breaking my legs. That was an interesting aspect of the relationship, not at all boring. Sex had given me problems before; in fact, as I shuffled through the dog-eared deck of my history it seemed to me that sex had nearly always had a negative effect on my productivity. But now my doddering testes had really dragged me into unknown waters, deep waters, I thought dramatically. And those blind organs were unrepentant! There had been that temporary dropoff after the encounters with April, but that was to be expected. It's only right after orgasm that you can see clearly what a drug trip sex is, and how the hormones erect a whole phony but totally convincing enchanted forest in your mind – a thousand native perfumes in the air, fluttering butterflies, warm sunlight filtering through the branches down to the soft, mossy earth where you lie, embracing the love of your life, and it's all hurrying you along to the Event that's finally going to resolve all your questions and doubts about the meaning of existence.

  The Event, however, generally turns out to be a clearcut. In fact, how I knew things were going to be different with Leilah was that with her there would still be a few big trees standing afterwards and even a couple of butterflies. No point in talking about that, however. But since Arthur's visit I'd run into April in the hall a couple of times. She'd been as friendly as ever; and even though the clearcut had already happened twice with her, and what her smile now brought to mind was mainly the image of Arthur like a fallen boulder on my couch and the threat of imminent bodily injury, the slope of her breasts under the chaste white blouse immediately produced the usual tingle. I suppose it was even enhanced by my carnal experience with her, coupled with Arthur's prohibition.

  Another topic that came up during my walks, of course, was the question of what it might feel like to get the shit beaten out of me or, more ambiguously, to be knocked off my bike by, say, a black Mercedes and then run over by a UPS truck. I've never had a high tolerance for pain, although I held my own reasonably well in the usual boyhood rough and tumble, played contact sports and all that. But I can still remember the first, and last, time I tackled somebody who was running full speed, head on. And although I had a few fights with the other kids, I never enjoyed it. That may have had less to do with the physical pain involved than with my instinctive distaste for conflict. I've always had what may be an excessive solicitude for the integrity of my skinny body. Along with the head-on tackle, I seem to remember every serious breech of its boundaries: the jacknife closing unexpectedly on my thumb, the edge of sheet metal slicing up through the flesh of my little finger during shop class in middle school, the front tooth broken off in the dish room at my college cafeteria, blood dripping down in front of my eyes from a tricycle accident when I was about 4, for god's sake. I cried bitterly at age 12 when I found out I had to have my bicuspids pulled for braces. I can't remember the actual pain from any of these events. No, it was always the damage to, or removal of, part of my body that bothered me. Reading descriptions of 15th-century Florentines getting flayed or drawn and quartered, the idea of the pain is abstract. What fascinates and horrifies me is the idea of looking down to watch some civil servant grab the end of your guts and haul them out onto the cobblestones, hand over hand. What would you be thinking at that moment?

  Given this history, and that Arthur was threatening, however discreetly, to rearrange my limbs, I should have been more upset. And I certainly wasn't enjoying the idea. But running against that fear was this weird kind of fuck-all mood, a sort of bring-it-on attitude. There were even thoughts of sneaking upstairs to have another go at April; as if I wanted to really push things, to see how bad they could get. The body, after all, was beginning to disintegrate on its own, without any help from Arthur or anyone else: skin slackening, a bulge appearing around my waist, presbyopia, teeth lengthening and the gaps between them growing so that they trapped every maddening little broccoli floret, eskers of varicose vein meandering down my calves, toenails yellowing and corkscrewing, liver marks on my hands, massive actinic damage on my scalp and the tops of my ears, gray chest hair, gray pubic hair, pecs starting to droop, muscles melting away no matter how many pushups I did, arthritic twinges in my hands and feet, maddeningly erratic prostate, rampaging memory loss, and eyebrow hairs that Rapunzel would have found very useful. What, then, did I have to fear from Arthur's ministrations, or rather those of his angels? Of course it was impossible to imagine Arthur himself engaging in any strong-arm tactics.

  The element of unreality in all of this was that I'd never had a serious injury or medical procedure in all my life, and took massive doses of ibuprofen at the first hint of a headache. The worst pain I'd ever felt had been a couple of sprained ankles. I knew that Arthur's associates could think up something for me that would feel worse than a sprained ankle, and I knew that getting hit by a black Mercedes would create a level of discomfort well beyond anything in my previous experience, but I pretended not to know it. As I stomped over the hills of SF I was enjoying thinking of myself as a man who didn't give a shit: a lonely, decaying, nihilistic bomb, finally ready, at the end of a fat and comfortable middle-class existence, to test the outer limits of sensation.