He pulls the car to the side of the road, opens the trunk and sets up his things. A lawn chair, a radio, a 6-pack in a big brown paper bag. The beer is still kind of cold. It's late afternoon, an hour or so before the normal end of work. He unfolds the chair, sits down carefully between the tight plastic arm-rests, opens a beer, and watches the town below. It's Tuesday.
Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."
As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.
The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.
It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.
Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.
It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.
On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.
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