The Dream and the Photograph

He puts down the newspaper, brings the glass he’s been drinking out of into the kitchen, and washes it and puts it upside down in the dish rack. He makes sure the door’s locked and turns off the kitchen light. He’s about to go to bed. It’s a little past nine. Around this time he almost always goes to bed, but he needs a book to read there. He finished a book this afternoon while he was having lunch and doesn’t know what he wants to read next. He sees Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lying flat, cover up, on a bookshelf in the living room. He read it about ten years ago, remembers liking it. He’s liked all of Sebald’s novels, Austerlitz the most, but that one he loaned to someone, he forgets whom, and never got it back. So maybe he’d like reading Saturn again, something he doesn’t do that much—reread a book—or just start it in bed and if he doesn’t think he’ll want to read any more of it, put it back on the shelf or in the bookcase with the other Sebald books tomorrow and look for another book to read. Or he can drive to his favorite bookshop in Baltimore, only a few miles from his house, and look for a book there. He’s done that a number of times at this shop, scanned the titles on the fiction shelves starting at “A” and a couple of times at “Z” till he found a book he wanted to read or at least start.

He opens the Sebald book to read the first page or two and a photograph drops out of it to the floor. “Damn,” he says, “what the fuck’s going on?” because so many things he grabs or even touches these days fall to the floor, forcing him to bend down and sometimes to get on one knee to pick up. He bends down and picks it up. The back of it says “6/07.” So it was taken in June, six years ago to the month. The photograph has several people in it, all facing the camera. He, Abby, two of his former colleagues at school, one standing beside his wife, his arm around her waist. Also, the two administrative assistants of his department at the time, and three women he doesn’t recognize. They must work in the Rare Books and Special Collections unit of the school’s library, because that’s the room the photograph was taken in. The occasion was the first day of an exhibit, timed to coincide with his retirement from teaching at the school after twenty-six years, of his original typescripts and first editions of most of his books and photographs of him doing several things related to his writing—sitting at his typewriter at home, reading to a small audience at his favorite bookshop in Baltimore, dressed in a tux at an awards ceremony in New York when he was a finalist for a prestigious literary prize, Abby standing next to him, holding onto her walker, and so on. The exhibit was up for two months. Sometime later, he forgets where he bumped into her, he asked the librarian (she must be one of the three women he doesn’t recognize in the photo) in charge of the exhibit and collecting his finished typescripts and working manuscripts and letters and such—even the unrepairable manual typewriter he must have written a dozen of his books on and which was also behind a display case in the exhibit—how many people came to it. “The usual,” she said, “or maybe a bit less, as it was summer and few students and faculty are around. Nine or ten? Maybe five more who didn’t sign in or were in the room for other reasons but stopped to look.” In the photograph Abby’s in her wheelchair and he’s behind her, hands tightly gripping the handles of the chair, which he always did when he stood behind it...