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Backward
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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78 Backward One year ago, my best friend from high school showed up wearing an orange rain poncho on a sunny day. I shook his hand like it was a pump handle and said his name out loud and told him it was good to see him. His arm was limp. His lips moved but he was unable or unwilling to speak. I couldn’t decide if his lips moved like someone eating or someone putting on lipstick. From the drawer by the stove, in which I also keep string cut into various lengths, I took a white pad and put it on the table with a pencil for my best friend from high school to write on. He rested his forehead on the pad. The pencil seemed to hold no attraction for him, though I would later find it beside the water softener, chewed up and down its length in an orderly way. I took him to the guest room. He held the pad to his forehead as he walked and slipped it under the pillow. As he eased under the covers, the orange poncho made a rustling sound like a child inside a pile of leaves. At that time, I had no job. For legal reasons, I am not allowed to discuss this situation. To keep busy, I was removing a shed and its contents from the far end of my property. Some days I dragged a single board from the shed to the pile I was making on my driveway . Most of the boards had nails in them, bent and rusted. Other days I would drag many boards and a parachute once that was in the shed for who knows why. I spread the parachute on the grass beside the driveway and lay on it. My hope was that I could feel if the parachute had ever been in the sky. I had no training in this sensibility and failed. There were two five-gallon paint buckets in the shed, full of dried yellow paint that made me think of someone living inside the yolk of an egg. There was a tricycle, three dolls’ heads, and one doll arm. A scythe, traps for small animals. The variety and number of objects seemed endless. I was going to break it all down—the four walls, the two sections of roof, the window that faced a field. When I removed the window, the image of the field remained inside it. hicok pages i-120.indd 78 1/7/10 3:23 PM 79 My best friend from high school took to following me as I worked. Our habit was to eat breakfast first, some kind of cereal or toast, maybe bagels with cream cheese, and then work until lunch. Because he ate twice as much as I did, you’ll find an entry in my journal about the appetite of silence. Is silence a form of hunger, I wrote, and then answered my own question: yes and no. Reading this now, I am disappointed in the wishy-washy quality of my thinking. I would like to go back and erase that answer. Yes, I would write, silence is a hunger for the anatomy of a moment, for the inside of things. I showed my best friend from high school the journal and offered to let him record what happened in his head. When he scratched his ear, I offered to buy a journal of his own in which he might write, “If I were God, the desire to edit, to perfect, would make all things impossible, including God” or “A man passed on the road today, dragging the shadows of chains from his ankles,” but he was content to follow me as I broke down faster what was falling down slower. Shadow is the appropriate word for our relationship. He moved always behind me and exactly as I moved. Not close enough to encumber my feet, not far enough that he might become unmoored and sail off on his own. You see also the language of ships enters my thoughts of this man at that time, though I know very little about ships or sailing. Was he a schooner behind me? Certainly he was not a battleship or an icebreaker, not a tug or an oil carrier. Beyond the nautical, his presence drew me back to an old idea, that we would be better off if everyone shifted one person over. I would move one person to my left...