Don’t tell me I’ve nothing to do

The town, which in the afternoons lay beneath the heat like some old animal too tired even for malice and yet never too tired for observation, for that slow communal watching by which people in small Southern places sustain themselves against the terror of their own inward silence, had taken to speaking of him again, his name passing from porch to porch and across counters smelling of flour and kerosene and pickled meat, accompanied always by that same mournful inflection masquerading as concern, as though his happiness — or rather their conviction of its absence — had become a kind of civic burden borne collectively like flood damage or drought, and he, hearing of it not directly but through the porous walls of the town itself, through glances half-averted and pauses too carefully shaped to be accidental, merely smiled in that distracted and secretive fashion of a man who has travelled so far inward that the language of ordinary consolation can no longer reach him.

Now, countin’ flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all

Because they did not understand — how could they? — that the room upstairs beneath the slanted roof with its stale currents of tobacco and old cloth and trapped summer heat had long ago ceased to be merely a room and become instead a geography entire unto itself, bounded not by walls but by repetitions, by the ritual observances through which a man, abandoned finally by chronology, manufactures from habit the illusion of continuance; the wallpaper with its faded flowers endlessly recurring in pink and rose-coloured chains, flower after flower after flower marching nowhere and therefore eternal, which he counted not because the counting mattered but because the numbers themselves became a kind of murmuring litany against the encroachment of thought, while upon the scarred table before him the deck of cards diminished by one mysterious absence spread and reshuffled and spread again through the sleepless hours, the missing card itself assuming in his imagination a monstrous significance, as though somewhere hidden beneath the bed or lodged invisibly inside the walls there remained concealed the single necessary thing whose absence rendered every arrangement provisional and incomplete.

Smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo

And all the while the television flickered there in the corner like a secular hearth before which he kept vigil, voices and jingles and the benign absurdity of Captain Kangaroo and his twisted compeers drifting through smoke thick enough to transform the room into some underwater cavern where time itself moved sluggishly and without consequence, and the cigarettes burned one by one between his fingers almost without his awareness, accumulating in bent grey columns beside the chair while memory — memory which never arrives in sequence but in odours, textures, flashes of light upon objects long vanished — rose ceaselessly through him: his mother standing at a window fastening an earring; the sound of ice breaking in a galvanized bucket on a summer morning 30 years dead; his father coughing behind a newspaper; the unbearable brightness of a string of Christmas lights at a murder scene seen once through rain; all of it suspended together outside chronology in that terrible republic of recollection where the dead persist not as bodies but as unfinished gestures.

Anyway, my eyes are not accustomed to this light

Sometimes near midnight he clothed himself ceremonially in the old tails hanging unworn in the closet, garments preserved less by care than by neglect, and before the spotted mirror he enacted for himself that ancient and specifically American pageant of imagined success, the ballroom, the orchestra, the women luminous beneath chandeliers, though even within the fantasy there lurked already the knowledge of fraudulence, because he could never wholly suppress awareness of the room surrounding him: the ashtray overflowing, the yellowed ceiling stained by leaks from winters past, the odour of smoke embedded so deeply in the curtains that it seemed exhaled by the fabric itself, and yet perhaps this tension between grandeur and decay constituted the fantasy’s necessity, because without ruin aspiration itself becomes invisible, and thus he danced there alone before the mirror with the solemn concentration of a priest performing rites whose meaning has been forgotten even while the gestures endure. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing,

And my shoes are not accustomed to this hard concrete

Visitors came occasionally, climbing the stairs with cautious footsteps and entering half-reluctantly as though fearful some condition might prove contagious, and he would greet them blinking against the daylight at his back, smiling too quickly, speaking too much, assuring them in tones almost feverishly casual that he was well, extraordinarily well, happier perhaps than any of them with their mortgages and church suppers and dutiful griefs, while beneath the speech itself his thoughts wandered elsewhere entirely, fragmenting and recombining beneath the surface of consciousness: flowers cards smoke television static morning night fifty-one fifty-one only fifty-one and where had the missing card gone and perhaps there had never been fifty-two to begin with perhaps the defect was original and merely unnoticed all those years because people will accept almost any incompleteness provided it is sufficiently familiar.

So I must go back to my room and make my day complete

Then at last, unable to endure the naked violence of daylight upon his eyes or the harsh finality of concrete beneath shoes grown accustomed to carpet worn thin by pacing, he would excuse himself and retreat once more into the room, not with shame but with something nearer devotion, as monks retreat into cells or widowers into memory, and there again the flowers waited faithfully upon the walls, innumerable and patient, while the cards lay ready for their endless rearrangements and Captain Kangaroo grinned eternally goofily from that luminous box with its bottomless reservoir of get-out-of-debt and weight-loss commercials as if no time had passed at all, no time anywhere, and the smoke drifted upward in frail blue spirals toward the ceiling where it disappeared like thought itself, like a dispersing murmuration of starlings, while the town below continued speaking softly of his loneliness, never suspecting that he had crossed gradually and irrevocably into that region beyond loneliness where habit becomes identity and repetition becomes prayer and a man, counting flowers in the half-dark, may persuade himself at last that the narrowing circumference of his life is not imprisonment but infinity itself.

Now, don’t tell me I’ve nothing to do