1 Day
by Nick Stokes
Copyright 2014 Nick Stokes
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
1 Day was first published in Prick of the Spindle, Print Edition #1.
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1 Day
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1 Day
SHE IS A person who has good and bad days. Though days are rarely wholly good, and rarely wholly bad.
“The days are holy,” someone once said.
She is a woman, then, who has good and bad moments, though the good sometimes lasts longer than a moment, as often does the bad.
Misquote. Mosquito. Moscow. “The days are gods,” is what he said.
She is a girl who suffers from good and bad spells. Suffer? Does suffer apply equally to good and bad spells?
She is a red flower who suffers from good spells and rejoices in bad spels.
“You wrote that to be cute,” she tells on herself to herself.
“To have fun.”
“Was it fun?”
“Yes. What do I care about spelling and word choice? I’m not an English teacher.”
She giggles because she’s alone. She is an English teacher.
Emerson said it. She knows. She was withholding information, like any good teacher, to amuse herself. The days are Gods. God is dead. God is in the details. God gets a D because he’s always tardy, doesn’t do the reading, doesn’t contribute to discussion, and doesn’t give a shit. She’d flunk him, but she doesn’t want him in class again next year. He’d rather smoke dope and shoot spitballs and make eyes at the cute girls.
She understands. She’d rather do that too.
She eyes the pile of papers. Mostly they suck. They burst with a sad dearth of sustained persistence, a hyperkinetic digital hodgepodge of fluffy, popular, redundant, hormone-driven thought, and acne. Their independent thoughts conform to others’ independent thoughts. They lack textual evidence to support their assertions.
“What do you expect,” she asks herself, “you’re not reading Dostoyevsky.” They are reading Crime and Punishment. She wishes she’d assigned The Idiot. At least she doesn’t care for that one. She has learned that it is easier to bear the mangling of a story near to her heart if she doesn’t care for it.
She thinks about making a new letter grade with the top paper on the stack and rolling a J, but she hasn’t smoked pot in a decade and she has a dependent relationship with her job and she doubts it’d be the responsible decision with Max asleep upstairs. She believes in free choice, but she hasn’t encountered it lately, and she’d prefer that her 4-year-old not spark up for a while yet. She gets a beer.
She writes some things on some papers. Some advice on spelling, grammar, logic. She makes no suggestions about having worthwhile ideas, or pursuing worthwhile objectives. Spelling has rules, grammar has logic, logic has … She corrects ellipses use. She invents some new letters to write at the top of the first pages. Or rather borrows, a CH from Spanish, an Å from Danish, an Œ from Latin; she doesn't know how to invent a letter.
By the bottom of the stack she is skipping the thesis and playing hooky on the body and barely sneaking in for the conclusion. Again and again she regrets reading the last sentence, but she does it anyway. Strata by strata, each one less illuminating than the one above, she scrapes away the mountain of papers and uses the waste to fill in the low spots of her sagging living room. She assimilates her valleys. She is tired of how they drain her.
Strip-mined, she retires to bed. She thinks, “Well, once again you’ve coughed up the coal to heat children’s thoughts into rising to spin the turbine to create the electricity that spins the world.”
Raskolnikov at one point thought, “To live in a square yard of space all your life is better than to die.”
She silently tells herself to be quiet. She’ll never sleep if she can’t shut-up.
***
At 4:30 a.m. she waits for the coffee pot to finish brewing. It is a kind of bliss to stand there in the black kitchen without thought and listen to water being boiled and bubbled and gurgled and gargled up a small tube by the expanding gases of the liquid-gas phase conversion, energized by a hidden electric heating element – and the water rains silently on cheap coffee grounds and leeches their flavor, caffeine, chemicals, and brown, and then jumps noisily first to splatter on the bottom of the glass pot and then to splash and disassociate then disappear into the deepening brown lake.
Twelve cups. Two days worth.
She grogs. Sometimes it pays for her to be inchoate. No, that’s a different word. Incoherent. She tries to return to passively watching the dripping, dirty water. It would be healthier for her to get more sleep. She’d be more stable, a better teacher, a better mother. She’d be better stabled, a better horse. But this – this absence while awake, this consciousness without thought, this is the bliss that mediates the remainder of the day. These few minutes, and the two hours of writing that follow, provide their own balance. And so she gets up before morning like a good farmer.
Not that she doesn’t know that these minutes and their pursuit provide no apples, no potatoes, no pigs to pile on the balance and raise the low side out of the dirt. That these massless minutes might be weight on the wrong side of the balance, like the accumulations of her thighs. That they, in their way, make the remainder of the day weigh on her more by insinuating that it doesn’t matter.
At the same time, she cannot be rid of the doubt that the reverse is true, that these first minutes are a waste of time, that she should be sleeping, and that it is all the other minutes of the day that matter.
Her moment of bliss has passed.
She carefully extricates Corelle bowls with green flowers and the large pot with flaking Teflon from the dish drainer to uncover her stained mug without waking Max. She pours coffee, spilling a few drops and leaving them. She sets the mug on the kitchen table without spilling and sits in a chair with peeling finish and a split seat. She sits at the table, sticky to her right at Max’s spot. She sits with a pen that was left in her classroom, a spiral notebook found in the Lost and Found, and her mug, a gift. She drinks coffee from the mug. As she drinks the coffee, air replaces it in the mug. Not nothing, but air.
She breathes. She’s always breathed, but she pays it attention for a moment.
She snorts and in her head shakes her head at herself like she is a pockmarked 16-year-old leaning back in his chair and staring into the buzz of a fluorescent bulb as she talks.
Bliss isn’t quite the right word, she decides, for this absence while present. Not decides – she knew already, has thought it all out before, but she thinks again about how it isn’t exactly bliss, and about how she hasn’t a more apt word.
“Why had he not killed himself?” Raskolnikov asked himself. Or rather the narrator asked. Dostoyevsky, then, asking Raskolnikov. Dostoyevsky asking himself. Or asking the reader.
She stops. She does not brave predawn dark to write another paper on “Crime and Punishment.”
Answers given by Raskolnikov: Pride. Cowardice. Instinctual habit.
Answer given, in the end, after thousands of other words, by the narrator: “He didn’t understand that consciousness might be the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life, and of his future resurrection.”
A paper unfurls before her, a paper she loves, a paper a joy to read, a paper arguing a point of view she hasn’t heard argued a thousand times before, and it argues with erudition, without cursing or crying or name-calling or hurling unbreakable dishes. The paper calls
the reliability of the narrator into question, as the narrator is nothing but a cardboard stand-in for the author, who was too busy puppeting his characters and gambling and raising money to pay off his bookies and having seizures that he wasn’t not fond of to fully inhabit his main character and accept Raskolnikov’s suicide as just, and that Raskolnikov, being an intellectual, and more than that, being self-conscious in a crippling way, to a degree that today would be certifiable and for which he would be prescribed a pantheon of drugs, and possessing a self-knowledge that most scholars and spiritual advisers and seekers of truth would envy, did understand the possibility of consciousness and had duly weighed it as a possible explanation as to why he had not thrown himself into the Neva after he murdered an innocent woman with an ax, but he concluded Dostoyevsky was blowing consciousness’s promise out of all proportion to compensate for his own shortcomings and that he himself found consciousness a wanting restraint. Which would require Raskolnikov to be conscious of Dostoyevsky, a post-modern leap, as if off a bridge, Raskolnikov couldn’t make because Dostoyevsky hadn’t made it for the reasons of epileptic self-involvement enumerated above and because Raskolnikov isn’t real and for other historical reasons that will remain unenumerated because the author realizes his or her argument has been circumnavigated, or circumvented, or circumcised and therefore further enumeration is a waste of time. Besides, Dostoyevsky spent years in exile in Siberia, as Raskolnikov will, so his credibility is hard to question.
She distracts herself. Conflation of author and narrator is the first great sin perpetrated against Kierkegaard. The second is no one understands him. The third is no one reads him. It’s his own fault. He’s nigh to impossible to read.
***
In light of the lack of a more worthwhile task, she chooses to account for her joys against the ticking clock. Clocks don’t tick anymore; sometimes they hum because of their excess of electrons, but the gears and weights and pendulums and cuckoos and ticking are only in her head.
Joys in the last 24 hours:
Max waking up with a big smile and hug yesterday
20 s
Max giggling when tickled, then hiding under the covers while I tried to dress him, before it pisses me off
60 s
Peeing a horse-load during 2nd period, 1st period in the books
23 s
Eating lunch outside in the sun, near a strawberry tree
15 min
She reaches on that last one, but she needs minutes. Not that eating outside in the sun near the strawberry tree wasn’t a kind of joy – she had been very hungry. She’d loaded up at the serve-yourself fajita bar in the cafeteria and actually got enough. And she was outside instead of in her windowless office or making awkward conversation with other faculty members, and the day was beautiful. She enjoyed it. Except immediately following the last bite, she’d had to go back inside, and the knowledge that she would have to go back inside molested the back of her neck like an expectant husband. Did it then count as joy? Maybe all joy pricks with pain.
Max yelps. He cries for her. A bad dream maybe. She can’t know; she can’t be in his head. She doesn’t go. Too early yet. If he gets up now, he’ll be a wreck and they’ll hate each other. If she goes to him, he’ll want to get up and be with her and it’ll end in crying. She cannot think while he cries. He cries her name three, four, five times, then silence. He is getting better at not needing her.
She needs to loosen her joy guidelines or she will have to find a river or a bay or an ocean to jump into before Max wakes up. She had not counted on being in the black on this balance sheet, but she’d prefer to be in a position to recoup her losses if the market takes a turn for the better. Her assignment is to spend, but buying crap she doesn’t need doesn’t gain her a purchase on joy. The problem is mere existence has never been enough for her. Her currency is joy, happiness, bliss, illumination, transcendence, words that make her blush. She tries to stimulate the economy of her mind by wanting what it is impossible to possess, and that doesn’t pay the bills.
Her overwritten metaphor doesn’t make her money, but it makes her happy. That’s okay, she’d rather be happy than money. She’d rather be belabored than worn and wrinkled and handled and wadded in pockets and coveted above all else.
Picking up Max after school, rapping with him to Heiruspecs and butchering “Quit my job so I can work more …” and switching discs to Wilco, “Jesus don’t cry, you can rely on me honey …” and almost crying, okay crying, and Max asking what’s wrong and me saying nothing and skipping the next song to rock out with him to “I’m the man who loves you.”
15 min
She didn’t relax her standards on that one. That had been unequivocal joy. Perhaps unequivocal because it had followed several hours of suck.
But that’s about it for straight-up joy.
She has to believe the numbers don’t mean what they say. Perhaps one second of joy is actually worth 100 seconds of non-joy. That’s how the numbers play out in sex, if she’s generous, as near as she can recall. If it’s a 1:100 ratio, she’d still be in the red, she thinks, though she’s not about to do the math. She smiles at herself, ever the shy girl. She’d rather not know than calculate exactly how much one second of joy needs to be worth for her to break even.
“Dave would’ve done that for me,” she doesn’t quite say. It’s too early to speak.
Another option to increase her net worth is to lump all non-negative, emotion-producing activities into the same category. Just a little accounting trick, a loophole, nothing illegal – why should only the rich be entitled? Bliss, joy, release, relief, absence, satiation, feeling useful and productive, zoning out.
She frets about being exposed in an audit. She smiles again – “Who says she doesn’t smile?” she thinks – and thinks, “Who cares enough to expose me?” There is no oversight, no regulation. Loosen the strings on joy then, unhook the corset. Take a deep breath and expand your minutes into happinesses.
First 5 minutes of checking e-mail during free period
5 min
First 5 min of web surfing for summer gardening supplies during free period
5 min
First 5 min of talking to colleagues in faculty room during free period (colleague-dependent)
5 min
First 5 min helping struggling student during free period, while still under impression that we’re making progress
5 min
Letting class out 5 min early without homework because didn’t have time to make copies of the worksheet during free period
5 min
Last class, with the lesson down so rote it was boring – delivered without paying attention, without stressing, without being present, with the promise of it being the last class of the day
50 min
Grading multiple-choice vocab quizzes
20 min
Running, pushing a 4-year-old in a chariot
30 min
Reading to Max before bed
15 min
Sleeping, not lying in bed not sleeping, but sleeping
5 hrs
Not half-bad, she thinks. But she won’t add up the deposits and withdrawals. She just won’t. That was Dave’s job. She feels like she’s in the black, and that’s good enough for now.
It’s a thing called faith. As Raskolnikov said, “I haven’t faith, but I have just been weeping in mother’s arms. I haven’t faith, but I have just asked her to pray for me.”
That’s pretty accurate, she figures, which reminds her of what she forgot.
Writing, morning, pre-dawn. Every tick an addition to today on the front end and a subtraction on the back end
2 hrs
Not half-bad at all. Not that she wouldn’t mind more additions to the front end and subtractions from her back end. Her daily income and accrued interest should equal her expenditures, inflation, and cost of living. Her goal isn’t growth.
Aloud, for her first words of the day, with the sky lightening throu
gh the window, with the sun rising and the weight of the day settling like stars on her shoulders, she quotes someone who never existed, a Russian with a hell of a name, like all Russians, “And I was ready to consent to live in a square of space!”
At which there is a thump above of Max getting out of bed, the creak of his door opening, the thud of the toilet lid, the sound of piss cascading and then dripping into deep water, and then a thirsty “Mommy!”
***
She bursts into the bathroom and proclaims to he on the pot, “My life has not yet died with that old woman!”
He can’t know that she’s Raskolnikov, but he knows she is his mother having fun. He chortles and says, “Good morning Mommy!” and she picks him up and they hug. He drips a drop or two of urine on her threadbare T-shirt, which quickly absorbs the wet and clings to her belly, which she is aware of being a little weird, and he, the smiling and laughing charmer, rears back and smacks her in the face.
Dave would’ve smacked him back and asked him how he liked it, told him how if he was mean, no one wanted to be with him. But she – she swallows tears and tells him to put his pants on.
***
She changes into her work clothes, something more professional than an old, moist, pink T-shirt worn transparent that some ex-boyfriend won for her when she was in high school like 20 years ago. The next outfit in a rotation established so she won’t have to stare into the overflowing abyss of the closet for minutes heaped upon minutes, and decide. Khaki slacks with a gray button-up whose collar flares over a black cardigan. Max is crying because he hit his head on the dresser while he spun to take off his pajama shirt. He likes helicopters, but that is something else. He spins like a dog chasing its tail to get some sort of better angle at pulling his arm through his sleeve. She smiles thinking about it. His cries mellow to whimpers as she buttons up her gray shirt and goes to him. Outside, the sun oranges. She wishes vaguely for a brooch that color.
***
They left late, for no particular reason. Probably because she sat at the table with her bowl of flakes and her Max and ate breakfast while they talked about going to the beach that weekend. It is only Wednesday, but they’ll make it to the weekend, by God. It’s only March, but if the calendar won’t read summer they’ll make their own.
She won’t have time to turn on her computer and waste five minutes. She’ll have time to walk into her office, drop off her bag and coat, grab the graded vocab quizzes, attendance sheet and participation sheet as cover, and hold the door for the last shuffling students, whose hands will be full of iPods and Starbucks, rebellious teenagers bucking the recession.