The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Read Free Book Online Page A

is a monster. Grief laughs at language, lazy language, its tendency to tidy, order, sweeten, console. “It’s all part of the deal.” Or: “You’ll meet again in another place.” Bullshit. It’s quite possible you could say such a thing and never mean to say it, never know where it was coming from.
    Or is our aversion more animal than that? Is it a set about the eyes? The way they hold their mouths? Maybe it is a smell they give off, a sadness collecting in their hair. A smell of motor oil, basement, rotten leg of lamb, an oil burner gone wrong, and if we breathe it we won’t ever get that smell out of our nostrils. We fear that if we’re around them too much, some of their bad smell will put a spell on us, and we’ll lose everything that’s dear to us, too. We’ll lose our friends and families; we’ll lose our houses. And of course we’ll do a much worse job of it. Oh, we’ll be completely raw in our grief, crawling around on our hands and knees until our palms are worn. We won’t be able to get up off the ground. And no one will call our phones or drop off baked goods because we were always too self-oriented to think about anyone else.
    Maybe it isn’t so sweeping. Maybe coming into contact with such immensity helps us to see that our lives are small, full of the dullest tasks made to distract us from the inevitable: we’re all walking up the road to death. We can’t hold on to that image without turning away from it. Virginia Woolf gets it right when she writes, “Bridges would cease to be built. Roads would peter off into grassy tracks …”
    Today everyone—M, my good friends, everyone—is involved in their busy lives. I say that with as much neutrality as I can. I haven’t made myself available to anyone exactly. I’m a visiting professor at a university, and I’m mentoring four graduate students from another university. If I had a grant or a fellowship, if I didn’t have to go into work to lead my classes or meet my students, I’m sure I’d leave the house less and less, only forcing myself to the supermarket when the coffee situation required attention. I know I’m certainly guilty of staying away from others when they needed me most. Not deliberately, but it is so easy to put off that phone call to the next day.
    We wait for the day when that friend has turned toward other things. No longer weighed down with the leaden coat of grief, and back to everyday anxieties: what to make for dinner, or what to do about jury duty.
    I’m certainly not that person yet. After some good days, some good weeks really, I see a surprising feature on my skin as I step out of the shower. A constellation of pink and crimson welts. The band stretches from the middle of my chest, beneath the right nipple, around to the center of my backbone. It looks as if someone has taken a cigarette and burned me with it, strategically, to punish my nerve endings. The band is remarkably ugly, and I can’t tell what’s worse, the growing pain of the sores, or the way the sores make me feel about my body. There’s been no warning for this, no headache or fever, no tingling or burning. It looks as if a war has played out on my skin. The inside of me rising against the outside. The sores weep. I thought I was doing so well, and now I see what I really am underneath it all: lost dog, wild and yowling, walking farther and farther into the woods.
    “Look,” I say to M an hour later. We’re standing in the living room. At Roger and Jill’s next door, someone is working a power saw. A mist of ripped wood is clouding the view beyond the fence. The sky looks like rain. I pull up my shirt to show him my torso.
    “Ouch,” he says, wincing. “Sweetheart. Ouch.” He reaches out with his hand to touch—I know he wants to make it better—before he pulls back. “I’m sorry. What is it?”
    “Shingles,” I say.
    “Shingles? What makes you say that?”
    I walk over to the open laptop, where I show him the results of my