Ensemble

could take a nap.

  He had enough boxes of brown rice and bags of frozen vegetables to last a long time, but he seldom was hungry. As often as he took the painkillers, he would be reminded of that indefinite pain which now seemed to be traveling inside him, making it sometimes difficult to draw in enough air to breathe, but always subsiding after he lay down for just a few minutes. He would stretch out on the futon beneath the big windows and watch the ever-changing skies and have thoughts that would start to shape themselves almost like incipient haikus. Sometimes his mind was one with all he saw: clouds and sun, other times stars and moon, sometimes the clouds shining like mirrors, or the stars glittering like his grandmother’s best jewelry inside a vast black velvet-lined jewelry box. Memories, broken fragments of his childhood, would often rise up from his consciousness like that as he lay there. His first storybook left out in the rain, a dog who’d run away from home and never come back, his father’s eyeglasses fractured in an accident, a fallen robin’s egg—small images like that rose up from the ocean depths. He’d watch the windows, moving in and out of sleep as if caught in a revolving door, happy to be where he was now, even if it would only be for a short while. And in the dark, his I-Book would purr and its photo screensaver would display random digital photographs from last summer: Tsu-Chi skinny and bare-chested on Crane’s Beach, Tsu-Chi serious in his lab coat, Tsu-Chi’s reflection in the shark tank at the aquarium, Tsu-Chi grinning with a gooey pizza slice, and even one of himself taken by Tsu-Chi, though he hardly recognized himself without his glasses or beard. (After the summer’s heat, he had recultivated the beard.) In that photo, before it dissolved into another of Tsu-Chi at the ferry pier in P-town, he looked young enough to be someone else, a boy lost at the ocean’s edge, grimacing and stupid.

  After deriving what he could from the scrambled instructions which came with the pen-and-ink set, he set to work another evening on a simple still life: an iron tea-kettle, an oversized apple, and a stack of moldering spy novels from the cabin’s bookshelves. He trained a reading lamp onto the scene, unfurled the pristine rice-paper across the bare planks of the floor, and kneeled like a proper Chinese artisan before the paper and the tools. A moment of silence as he closed his eyes and tried to see the objects clearly and solidly in his mind. Deep breath in, deep breath out. This time, he made several bold strokes across the paper, trying to duplicate curves convex and concave of kettle and apple, as well as the jagged edge of paperbacks, but his composition soon became one more of shadows than light; it ended a tangled knot of inky spatters and whorls, more of a bowerbird’s messy nest than an uncomplicated domestic arrangement. He should have known better: a true Chinese artist would have painted a nightingale singing by a simple spray of blossoms or perhaps a ragged mountain chasm lost in the clouds, something purely from nature or memory. But not something that meant so little to him.

  Exhausted from such concentrated effort gone awry, he once again crumpled up the rice paper and tossed it into the fire. Was he no longer an artist? Could he only create with the help of a computer and the electronic tablet tethered to it? Sometimes he felt he could no longer really see outside the confines of a glowing LCD screen; at the end of a long day at the magazine, when he at last lifted his head and gazed out into the empty office, it would appear curiously flat and colorless compared to the bright and dazzling world he had inhabited for the last eight or nine hours. If someone else happened to be on the premises, too, and spoke to him, it would be like an oracle’s from the underworld, speaking a name he had forgotten.

  At last he had to go into town for fresh soymilk, if they had it, and other perishables. Although temperatures had descended lower and lower for the past couple of weeks, it had not snowed, so the roads were clear and the steep drive navigable. The small town glistened under its coating of ice and snow, so bright in the noon sun it was hard to look into shop windows or across empty, shining parking lots without blinding oneself. Before loading up supplies, he decided, he would have lunch at one of the town restaurants. He remembered its cheery atmosphere from last summer—the laughing vacationers, the friendly townsfolk, even the plastic flowers on every table. Although he’d been often been called a “loner” since he was a small boy, he suddenly felt like seeing people again, hearing them gossip and flirt, engaging with them in the mundane business of life. He imagined what it would be like to chat with a waitress, to linger over the menu, to watch skiers huddled over their hot cocoa, murmuring with delight. Maybe he would tell the waitress what he had not dared to tell anyone else. “By the way,” he might say, “tell the cook to hurry. I’m dying, you know.” What would begin with chuckles and awkward pauses would end with the waitress listening to his long, sad story. “You take real good care, hon’,” she would say with a catch in her throat after she had brought him the check, while he was counting his change. Their dialogue played itself out like a scripted drama in his head as he drove down the commercial strip, searching left and right, trying to read signs in the glaring light. All three restaurants were closed, even the tavern. There weren’t even any other cars on the road, here at midweek just before everyone else would take off for their Christmas break. It might as well have been a ghost town. He turned on the car radio just to end the silence: news of Iraq and Israel, effigies burned in the streets and car-bombs and unemployment rates. Apparently, the world had decided to go on without him.

  At the convenience store, he tried to talk to the teenage girl behind the counter, who was counting up his cartons and loaves. She looked too frail, too young to be out of school, but he imagined she might already have a colicky baby her mother was taking care of that afternoon, or even a husband who was driving the town plow out somewhere toward Lincoln Gap. There was a flag pin on her blouse—a leftover from 9/11 or in preparation for upcoming events? She wasn’t unlovely. “Yep, it’s cold all right,” she said, paying more attention to the soap opera on the little black and white television set on a shelf beside her than to him. Before his eyes, she seemed to age—she became puffier and rounder, her hair grew lank and gray, her skin paler and blotched, her eyes lusterless. She became her grandmother. He realized he was watching her as she would be long after he was gone from this place. And she was not really listening to whatever he had to say. Maybe he had said something about the imminent war, maybe just the weather—he could no longer hear even his own voice, which seemed to echo down some long corridor of the past.

  “I need another dollar,” the teenage girl said in that glum, flat way all teenage girls seemed to talk like these days.

  “Sorry, here you go.” She was not even looking at him. He was less real to her than the characters in that soap opera. What if he were to touch her hand, just to let her know he was alive? He suddenly felt sadder for her than he could ever feel for himself, and he carried his groceries out to the car and drove home the way one might in a dream, executing all the motions, but looking out from a body that was as insubstantial as smoke.

  The sky above the cabin was already turning the color of one of his overripe Bread and Circus plums at the edges, and the little light he had left on above the sink shone out like a beacon. Once he put the supplies away, he would take a much-needed nap.

  The cabin was so high up, and the mountains surrounded it so closely, that the already shortened days were constricted even further; the sun would not make it above the eastern peaks until almost ten, and sunset would begin to announce itself around three, not with any glorious colors, but with that rapid darkening from plum-purple to inky blackness by four-thirty. After dark, he would become even more aware of the wind howling through the fir trees, the creaking of the cabin as it settled further into the cold rocks beneath it, and the skittering of small creatures under the floorboards or within the walls—or, occasionally, a larger animal (a porcupine, most likely) gnawing at a corner of the cabin outside. It was then that he would brew himself some strong green tea, pry open the clamshell of his computer, and disappear
again into the herky-jerky rhythms of his perpetual game. “Do you wish to continue our adventure, master?” his avatar would ask, and he would take up where he had left off the previous evening.

  Although the clock on the wall watched the hours for him, he had already lost track of days of the week. That was surprising, how quickly the five-day work-week no longer meant anything to him—but he estimated that soon it would be the shortest day of the year. If he bothered to count, he might be able to estimate just how much longer he could be here before his body began to give out and he would have to reenter the real world, just to finish things up in the medically advanced and socially approved fashion. But what if he didn’t? What if he were just to stumble up the mountain some evening like a dying Iroquois, into snows ever higher and air ever purer, until he simply disappeared into moonlit snowbanks bright as noonday? He’d read that freezing to death was supposedly the gentlest way to day—your body actually seemed to grow warmer as its nerve-endings deadened and tissues froze,