A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

indeed, I’m falling towards the sun, which when it sets goes down here past the edge of the world for the night and rests, keeping the lava bubbly near the middle of things. Fortunately I’ve got my magical sunglasses on, so that when I plunge into the sun, which roars like a locomotive, it isn’t too bad on the eyes, and then I’m squirted out again, and I fall—i.e.,rise—past rocks and roots until I’m almost at the edge of the underworld, and there I grab a root and hang on, dangling, and pull myself up so that my chin is over the edge, and I have a brief chance to survey its features. It is a grassy place with some trees and a new housing development going up, each house with a large pseudo-Palladian window over the front door. And then the root gives way and I tumble away back through the set sun: down once again becomes up and I am back on the grassy verge where I began my walk.
    Claire and I took a walk yesterday afternoon along the place where the trolley to West Oldfield used to go. When we started, there was still plenty of afternoon light left, and then the slow-roasting orange clouds began, and by the time we reached the little cemetery where you can see through to the lake, the light had an impoverished glow of the sort that induces one’s retinas to give extra mileage to any color because the total wattage of light is so radically reduced. Where the snow had gone away, the tan layer of needles on the ground sang out with a boosted pallor, and a mitten-shaped patch of cream-colored lichen on a gravestone waved at me in the gloom and made me want to have been a person who devoted hislife to the study of lichens. I told Claire that I was having lichen-scientist thoughts, wishing I had become a lichen man, and she nodded. She’s heard me say it before.
    I’m burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.
    Where have I seen that interesting blue-green lichen color recently? Yesterday morning it was—no, day before yesterday—when I opened the hood of our Mazda minivan in order to replenish the tank of windshield-washer fluid. I’d turned on the car to warm it up, and I’d pressed the button that activates the rear-window heater—a stave of long wires elegantly arranged like the plectrum of a hardboiled-egg slicer, buried in the glass, which melts the ice with surprising efficiency—and then I pulled the hood release and heard the hood spring free. I propped it up on its cold rod. The windshield fluid is stored in an L-shaped tank that has a representation of a windshield wiper’s swath molded into it. It was down to the dregs, squirted dry. That’s not safe. When the truckssalt the roads, the white smear of salt solution on the windshield sometimes catches the glare of the risen sun and obscures the road entirely, forcing me to poke my head out the window to see where we’re going. The plastic was cold and inflexible, its edges slightly painful to the fingers. I poured the pink liquid in. The engine, idling, trembled its hoses. When the tank was full, I snapped the lid back on and pulled the hood prop from its oval hole and, lowering it, pushed it into the metal prongs that wait in the gutterish area where the hood’s shape fits. And then, just before I let the hood drop shut, I noticed that the battery had grown some lovely turquoise exudate, electrical lichen, around one of its poles.
    It isn’t clear to me why I grew up to be someone who can spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis, and yet whose knowledge of car repair extends only as far as replenishing the windshield-wiper fluid. When I was a teenager, I took off and put back on as much of my ten-speed bicycle as I could, soaking the wheel bearings in gasoline overnight and then packing