Snow falls for three full days. I dust and clean, oil my boots, wash clothes, and hang them on a line near the stove to dry. I commit passages from Horace and Selected Philosophical Essays to memory, continuing the graft of this fanciful self of mine from the newly cut boughs piling up at my feet. Remaining indoors helps, but despite all efforts of concoction—and with the snow piling up outside to suspend my own and the daily rhythms of the town—a kind of private obliteration occurs so that after the third full day indoors, I find I have begun to play around in Cartesian fashion with doubts about my own existence. The game is surprisingly entertaining, and the hot stove in the living room helps. But it doesn’t last long. In the end I am forced to admit that there is no existence to obliterate, merely a purely contingent self that finds the roaring flesh satisfying and irrecusable.
The telephone has been out, and this has added to my sense of seclusion. I haven’t missed it. The image of toppled poles and tangled wires, of civilization interrupted by a broken flow of electrons (and no one bothering to report it) is amusing. Mohr is the only person who ever calls anyway. As far as spontaneous dialogue, I haven’t felt much of an urge.
I haven’t seen Tom Schroeder since the summer. I never recovered my notebook, and none of my complaints to the police seem to have resulted in anything. I walk to the police station. The desk sergeant recognizes me. “How about this storm?” he asks. “Holding up against it?”
“So far,” I answer. “The reason I stopped by …”
“You mean you didn’t come by just to say hello?”
“I was wondering what happened with that kid I complained about last summer. Tom Schroeder.”
The sergeant taps his pen on the desk, squints into the distance to summon his memory. He picks up the phone. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
While he talks on the phone I wander over to browse the Wanted posters, a gallery of black-and-white pictures hanging on a corkboard just inside the main entrance. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers, kidnappers, pedophiles. A wall of faces tied to specific acts, blotched and blemished and wearing the sullen look of imprecation that turns each into the hero of his own crime and so poorly masks the secret joy of it.
The sergeant puts down the phone. “The kid left town last August, he says. Hasn’t been back since.”
“Who told you?”
“The detective.”
“Ross?”
“No. Blucher. Ross is in Florida on vacation.” The sergeant taps his pen on the desk. “Ross the Boss. Wish I was in Florida.”
“What about Schroeder?”
“Kid’s in college. Got a scholarship to Notre Dame.”
“College?”
“Maybe it’ll straighten him out. He’s a smart kid. Anyway, if he comes back we’ll be keeping an eye on him.”
“Were other people complaining?”
“No complaints. Just hanging around a bad crowd. Notre Dame’ll straighten him out. I’ve seen worse,” the sergeant says with a lilt, points his pen at me with a flick of his wrist, then resumes tapping it on the desk.
Mrs. Entwhistle nods at me as I pass by the reading room and head for the staircase that leads to the second floor. I’ve been more or less asked to force myself on the place, and by obliging I seem to be perpetuating a fantasy of mutual need. Mohr, it seems, likes having me around, and I enjoy the welcome feeling.
I find Mohr upstairs hunched over his paper-strewn desk, talking on the telephone. He looks up as I enter and nods at me. He has a furtive, conspiratorial style on the telephone, head dropped, voice lowered, receiver pressed against the side of his head. I peel out of my snow gear and seat myself in an old wooden office chair that squeaks and squeals and tilts back at an awkward angle.
The room has undergone several stages of transformation since my first visit. There are boxes and boxes and stacks and piles of photocopied documents. The originals are piled on a table in the center of the room. The fluorescent hood still hangs over the long table, and the new Xerox machine stands along the wall. Boxes of documents that had been stored in other parts of the building are now stacked against the rear wall of the office. They contain the paper legacies of other families of the town who thought enough of themselves to have left to posterity their yellowing papers and secret diaries and photo albums and letters and genealogies scrawled on grease-stained napkins. The town seems to have been inhabited for a time by a variety of impulsives and obsessives, egotists, graphomaniacs, and collectors. Many boxes are marked Private. One, donated by an anonymous gentleman, contains a collection of erotic postcards from French West Africa depicting native men and women cavorting in their newly colonized Eden. Pith-helmet porn, Mohr calls it. Another box is labeled The Geographical and Geological History of the Region Reconstructed from the Fossil Evidence Collected and Cataloged by Mr. Joseph Goldsborough.
Mohr seems to have been inspired by the offer to purchase the Wilkington material. Some dormant vision for the library has been rekindled, his ambition stoked. He has convinced himself that the entire archive of local history must be duplicated in order to preserve it, so every document is first being Xeroxed onto acid-free paper and the originals packed away. The copying machine I donated has stimulated his appetite for more machinery, and now he has undertaken a campaign to raise money for the library. He seems so contented lately that I don’t think it matters if he raises any or not. His efforts are sincere, although I tend to see them as a last stand against his own moribund condition. He is happy with the illusion, call it progress—the perpetual approach to some forever receding goal. The difference between Mohr and me is that having defined for himself a goal he believes to be worth pursuing, his contentment comes from the act of pursuit, whereas I think it is futile to state goals or pursue “progress,” unless it be defined simply as peace of mind—and in that case I would say the only worthy pursuit is the avoidance of goals. To see Mohr on the telephone conferring in breathless sentences and behaving as if he were some busy politician garnering votes makes me see how terrified he really is of the end he is facing.
“How are you?” he asks, hanging up the telephone.
“How are you?”
He shrugs meekly, then launches into an explanation of his most recent efforts. I drag my chair up to the corner of the long table in the center of the room and glance casually at a letter from Major Wilkington dated October 2, 1861 … raising an army for the defense of the Union …
“It’s a marvelous opportunity. A coalition of businesses in the area is going to donate money and equipment to digitize the entire archive,” he says.
I am distracted by Wilkington’s letter, in which he describes his efforts to raise a force of volunteers to go off and fight the Civil War. I read the entire text while Mohr talks. “Digitize?”
“It means every document will be scanned into a computer that will convert the image so it can be stored electronically.”
“And what happens after that?”
Mohr looks at me as though I haven’t understood and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Well, most importantly, the material will be preserved. And of course, anyone who wants to look at a document or a photograph can look at it on a computer.”
“Exactly. The originals can be locked away. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. The documents will only rarely ever need to be handled. And searching through the archive will be a matter of keystrokes.”
“So all this photocopying has been a waste of time?”
Mohr shrugs. “Not entirely. We will have a duplicate paper archive to fall back on.”
“How convenient.”
“The technology is very accessible now. Everyone is digitizing their collections. The opportunities are marvelous. Eventually we can make the archive—the history of the whole town—available on the Internet!”
“Internet?”
“The information superhighway. The World Wide Web. It’s transforming the way we go about our lives. Don’t tell me you never heard of it.”
I shrug, not wanting to provoke him further and only mildly shocked at his newfound technological positivism. He picks up the telephone. “Do you have time today?”
“I think I’ll go downstairs and read for a little while.”
“Come back up before you go.”
I go downstairs and retrieve my books from their shelf behind the circulation desk. Mrs. Entwhistle is chatting with an elderly lady about a book the woman is checking out. There are a few people scattered in chairs around the reading room. I go directly to an empty table and sit down, placing the books so the titles on the spines are facing toward me.
As far as progress goes, I suppose the digitization of documents is a step toward the perfect archive—if the perfect archive is simply a place where papers are locked away and preserved over time. The technology that has Mohr so excited permits the separation of the physical document from its contents while preserving the original holograph. I suppose that it is progress of a sort. I browse the spines of the books on the table. They too are an archive. The volume of Horace lying before me, one in a series of regressing shadows, manuscripts labeled Milan, Ambros. O.136 sup (olim Avennionensis), s. IX/X. Or Berne 363, s. IX2—which was written in a continental Irish scriptorium in northern Italy sometime in the ninth or tenth century. All are shadows of some ancient codex, iterated and reiterated through a warp of time and changing language into the bilingual Latin/Modern English edition lying before me now. Everything mortal dies. And language has yet a briefer span of pleasing life. It is a truth that Mohr’s digitized archive cannot negate. His holographs, paper and electronic, will be as remote a thousand years from now as the text of Horace’s satires copied out in monastic scriptoria are to us today.
In an hour I go back upstairs. Mohr is waiting for me. “It looks good,” he says without any preamble.
“What does?”
A sepulchral grin distorts his face. He stands up and walks around his desk. “The money.” He leans against the edge of his desk and crosses his thin arms over his chest. “I wouldn’t have guessed there were so many people interested in the history of the town. They’re practically falling over each other to contribute to the project.”
I listen while he spells it all out and then concludes by saying, “It’s the technology. That’s what has them interested. They think it will make them want to come in and use it. If I were asking for funds to rebind damaged books—forget it. Nobody would give me a dime. But mention technology and everybody says, ‘Oh, how educational! It’s about time we got up to speed with the technology.”’
“And the archive that has been quietly resting here for the better part of the century will suddenly become all the rage?”
Mohr shrugs and drops his chin to his chest as though in contemplation, then lifts his head back up. “There will be a dedication ceremony,” he says.
I pick up his thread. “And people will come for a while to use the new machines. Look up the names of their relatives, show their kids. Then it will collect dust. Just like the books on the shelves do.”
“I plan to scan the photograph collections first. The photographs will make a bigger initial impression.”
“And after that, Major Wilkington’s accounting statements and shopping lists?”
“Say what you like. It’s for the good. As long as the collections are preserved.” He sits down in his chair behind the desk.
“But by preserving the stuff in a format based in an esoteric technology, all you’re doing is making the material less available to the future!”
“As long as the information is preserved … that’s all that counts.” He pauses to shuffle some papers on the desk. “You’re too pessimistic, Horace. If I listened to you I would do nothing.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”
He waves me away with a disgruntled flap of the wrist. “You tire me out, Horace. Really, you do. I don’t understand why you say half of what you say.” He looks at his watch, a large old thing that dangles on the bones of his wrist like a heavy bracelet. “The library closes in ten minutes. Would you like to join me for dinner?”
“Where?” I ask, surprised by the invitation. Mohr and I have kept our acquaintance to the library since that night of drinking and confession.
“Across the street. The food isn’t bad.”
“I’m not hungry. But I’ll keep you company.”
“Great.” He hauls himself out of the chair. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
I go outside and wait for him. The air is crisp and very cold. The lights at the front entrance cast a warm, incandescent glow across the snow. Traffic is moving steadily along Main Street, the rush-hour exodus of people and cars almost over. I lean against the brick wall beside the entrance, saturated by a sense of well-being. The cold air, the steps of the library, the snow; a sense of being completely in the present, of fitness and proportion and charm that I can’t sum up but which has descended on me like a momentary state of grace. I take long drafts of cold air into my lungs and exhale large clouds of steam that dissolve in a yellow glow of light.
Mohr emerges from the front door and locks it behind him. We stand together at the top step for a moment, looking at the thin stream of traffic passing slowly up Main Street. “Come on,” he says and carefully descends the icy steps, one at a time.
The Corn Tassel is one of those restaurants that changes its atmosphere according to the meal being served. At lunch it is a busy diner. At dinner the lights are dimmed and it becomes a cocktail lounge and restaurant. Mohr chooses a booth. He peels off his overcoat and hangs it on a hook and slides onto the crimson vinyl bench. I slide in across from him as the waitress appears.
“How are you tonight, Mr. Mohr?”
“Oh, same as always,” he responds in a voice reserved for the occasion.
“That’s good. Can I get you something to drink?” She is a large woman on the edge of matronly middle age with a wide, friendly face. I think I’ve seen her before but don’t remember where. The bank, maybe.
“I’ll have the usual.”
“Glass of red wine?”
Mohr nods.
“I’ll have a cup of coffee.”
The booth makes it feel like we’re squaring off for something. Mohr fidgets with his silverware and says a few things about the cold and the food at the restaurant. Then, after the waitress has brought him his wine and me my coffee, he looks me squarely in the eye. “I’m going to retire in two weeks.”
“In two weeks?”
“And I am moving into the hospice.” He lifts his glass to his lips and sips with a mild, bemused expression.
“What about all these plans you’re making?”
“My successor can take them over.” He sips his wine. “I wish I’d taken to fund-raising a long time ago. I seem to be fairly good at it. People become so friendly once they’ve decided to part with some of their cash. And you want to know something?”
“What’s that?”
“Being sick has come in handy.”
“You mean people feel sorry for you?”
He nods and laughs. “It’s like taking candy from a baby.”
“So how much have you raised?”
“More than I ever imagined possible. Enough to get the collection digitized and the place wired with computers. Mrs. Entwhistle will have plenty to work with.”
“She’s taking over from you?”
He nods.
“Can’t you stay long enough to get it started?”
He puts his glass down and drops his hands into his lap. The lamp attached to the wall in the booth casts a shadow that makes the lines and crevices of his face seem deeper and the hair of his wig seem darker than it actually is. “I’m too exhausted. I’ve done as much as I can, and now it’s time to stop. I go to the oncologist three mornings a week. Then to work. Then home. I’m stoked with painkillers and pep talks from the doctor. It’s the pep talks that are killing me.” He smiles and reaches for his glass.
The waitress arrives to take the order. Mohr asks for chicken pot pie, carrots, broccoli, and another glass of wine. He gives me a knowing grin. “How about you?” “I’m fine.”
“You’re not going to order dinner?” the waitress asks.
“No thanks.”
“Have a glass of wine with me,” Mohr says.
“Okay,” I agree.
“Red or white?” the waitress asks.
“Red.”
She jots everything onto her pad and departs to fill the order.
“I have a glass of wine every night at dinner,” Mohr says, still grinning. “Since last summer. Of course, they don’t serve the good stuff here.”
“When are you moving?” I ask.
“Next week.” His expression turns serious. “A place came available. I’ve got to take it or they’ll bump me to the bottom of the list.” The waitress brings our wine. “My friend Bill is coming from Chicago to help get me settled.”
“That’ll be good.”
“I’m afraid he’s in for a shock. We haven’t seen each other for several years. I’ve lost a lot of weight.”
“I’m sure he knows what to expect.”
Mohr shrugs. “Knowing what to expect and confronting the facts are two different things.” He looks into his glass for a moment. “We lived together for close to ten years.” His voice has the edge of confession in it. I sip from my glass and wait for him to continue. “How do you like the wine?” he asks after a brief silence.
I shrug, not expecting the detour. “It’s not the greatest.”
“It stinks,” Mohr says. “I’ve always meant to bring my own bottle, but I always forget, and now I’m used to drinking the bad stuff.”
A few more people come into the restaurant, all elderly regulars. Mohr waves to one couple who take the booth behind us. “He used to be the mayor,” Mohr says.
“Do you eat here often?”
“Since I stopped cooking, almost every night.”
“When did you stop cooking?”
“About six years ago,” he says. “When Bill moved to Chicago.”
I can tell he would like me to ask about Bill, give the signal that I’m ready to hear his whole story. But I’ve already deduced the outlines of it from the tone in his voice and don’t need to hear it. Don’t want to, really. “What about the hospice?”
“What about it?”
“Will they feed you there?”
“Of course.” Mohr pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It’s their job. And they do a lot more than just feed you.”
“Such as.”
“They nurse you to death.” He says it with mock sarcasm, the bitterness in his tone stemming, I guess, less from the irony of the observation than from the fact that I haven’t given him the opening to talk about Bill.
The waitress arrives and sets Mohr’s meal in front of him and asks if she can bring me anything. I shake my head and settle back to watch Mohr as he picks up his fork and begins the motions of eating. After a few dabs and bites he puts the fork down, takes a sip from his glass, and returns his napkin to the table.
“You’re not going to eat?” “I can’t.”
He shakes his head. “My appetite. It comes and goes at random. It’s the medication, I think.”
“What kind of medication?”
“Painkillers, mainly. They do funny things.” He leans back and stares across the table at me. His black horn-rims make it seem as if he is looking at me through a barrier erected across his face. I can see the air going out of him.
“Do you want to leave?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Sitting here is fine. You’ll have to pardon me. The end of the day is exhausting.”
The waitress stops by. “Is there anything wrong, Mr. Mohr?”
He shakes his head. “No. Just resting.”
“You want me to clear it away?”
“Leave it. Maybe I’ll get inspired.”
She smiles indulgently and bustles off, well acquainted with the routine. We sit in silence for several minutes. Mohr makes another attempt to eat, but after a few small bites he puts his fork down again and signals the waitress to take it away. “You know,” he says after the table is cleared, “I won’t really miss the library.”
I wait for him to continue.
“I used to think of it as an extension of my personality. When I started it was a more vital part of the town than it is today. We had money then. For programs. I used to put all sorts of things together. Concerts. Lectures. Seminars.”
“What happened?”
“Money dried up. People lost interest. Things change. I hope Mrs. Entwhistle will be able to put more things together than I have been able to these last years.” He sips his wine. “Besides remedial reading programs. Read a Book This Week. Read to the Children Day. Reading Is Fun Month. It’s depressing. Enough of that. Tell me about your family.”
“My family?”
The note of surprise in my voice makes him smile. “Parents. Brothers. Sisters. Tell me about them.”
“Come now,” he says, smiling and on the offensive. “Everybody has a story to tell.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“Everybody has a story to tell, and mine is no different from any other.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. Are you estranged from your family?”
“You could say that.”
“When did you last see your mother?”
I calculate the years back. “Fifteen years ago. Something like that.”
Mohr’s eyes widen behind his glasses. “Fifteen years! And your father?”
“The same.”
“Brothers? Sisters?”
“I don’t have any.”
He smiles at what he senses to be a hint of things to come and sits up as straight as he is capable of. The rush to probe has revived him and sparkles in his eyes. To satisfy his pathetic curiosity, I decide to oblige him. “My parents are dead.”
“Oh, I, I’m sorry.” My statement deflates him momentarily; then he resumes the inquiry. “Were they old?”
“No. They both died fairly young.”
“I see.” And his tone says, Now I’m beginning to understand.
“I was thirty, I think.”
Mohr will not be denied. “Were you close?”
“No. Not at all. I knew from the time I was a kid that I was different from them. They knew it too.”
“Funny how that works,” Mohr says without a trace of irony in his voice.
“The only way I can think of them now is as stereotypes.”
“How do you mean?” The look of engrossment on Mohr’s face is too authentic to back out and, in a way, outweighs my reservations about talking.
“Only that they were typical.”
“Just typical.” I lift the glass to my lips. The sour smell puts me off, but I sip anyway and try to end the narrative. “My father had a heart attack and died at fifty-seven. My mother died at fifty-one.”
Mohr gives a grave nod of recognition and presses on. “How did she die?”
“She killed herself.”
“I see,” Mohr says without changing expression.
“In a manner of speaking,” I add, finding it strange that these barest facts can still make me mad. “She drank herself to death. Worked hard at it for years.”
“Out of grief?”
“More out of boredom, I think. Boredom and acute self-absorption.”
“That is sad,” Mohr says. “Where did you live before you came here?”
The waitress sweeps by, offers coffee and dessert, then disappears again. The restaurant is empty except for the former mayor and his wife seated in the booth behind us and two truck-driver types drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at a table near the door.
“Everywhere.”
“Abroad?”
I nod, pausing to consider how much further my little autobiography needs to go. It isn’t intimacy with Mohr that causes my reluctance but the decision I made years ago to maintain myself always in the present. The past is a vortex of traps into which it is easy to fall and difficult to get out of, the birthplace of illusions and the graveyard of the self. Danger signs should be erected in the lobe of the brain that controls memory, one going in that reads Check idylls at the door and one going out that reads Deposit all grudges.
“Where abroad?”
“All over. It really doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“Would knowing make any difference?”
Mohr thinks for a moment. “I suppose not,” he says.
“There’s nothing to tell. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mohr’s face goes red. “Talk about self-absorption! Now I know where you inherited it from. I’m not just some nosy neighbor, Horace.” His brow collapses in a bundle of knots and his eyes fix on me from behind his glasses and under his wig like submerged points.
His vehemence catches me by surprise. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“The trouble with you is you don’t ever know what you mean. You’re so goddamn blasé it makes me sick. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you don’t impress me with it one bit.”
“I’m not trying to impress anyone.”
Mohr is rolling and cuts me off. “I don’t care what you say, nobody, nobody, nobody …”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody can talk the way you just did—as if you were describing some sociological phenomenon. It’s pompous and stupid. Have your emotions atrophied completely?” He is sputtering and leans back to catch his breath. I wait for him to continue, but he turns his gaze out into the restaurant. “I don’t believe you are being sincere.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not being frank. You’ve never sorted yourself out—emotionally.” He stops there and dabs his slightly beslobbered lips with a napkin.
“I prefer to live in the present.” For a few minutes an uncomfortable silence reigns. I lean back and try to imagine what has prompted his outburst, what has upset him. Mohr doesn’t look at me but out into the restaurant like an injured lover. He turns to me, tears welling. I continue, “And my emotional life hasn’t atrophied. I have just taken firm control of it.”
“Glad to hear it.” He seems to want comforting.
“I didn’t mean to put you off. I just don’t think discussing the past is always the best way of framing the present. I prefer to let mine rest.”
“I’m sorry,” Mohr says, removing his glasses and dabbing his eyes with the corner of his napkin. “I don’t know what got hold of me.”
“Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your parents.”
“Maybe I can agree with you up to a point.” He replaces his glasses. “But I find that memories can be a source of comfort.” He pauses for me to object, then continues, “I grew up in Cincinnati. Mount Adams. As kids we used to call the neighborhood Mount Dumbass.” He chuckles, begins to cough, and stops himself, holding a fist against his chest. “Our house overlooked the Ohio River. My father worked for the electric company. He married my mother when she was seventeen. I had an older brother, Jim. He was killed in Korea. It was devastating, terrible, the whole family. Now you know how old I am.”
“I never really cared.”
Mohr shrugs and continues. “My mother had a nervous breakdown. Back then people got put away for that kind of thing. Lobotomized. Luckily, my father was something of a skeptic and didn’t want to leave Mother to a bunch of men in white coats. He took early retirement and moved us to Florida. It was an extraordinary thing to do, I now realize. My father was an extraordinary man. I went off to college shortly after that.” He begins to cough and wrests control again. “I visited them whenever I could. Anyway, my mother got better.”
“Are they still alive?”
“My father died ten years ago. Mother died one year later almost to the day.” He begins to slump a little so that, seen from across the table, he seems to be shrinking. “Lately I think about my brother more than I do about my parents. His death was so—unfair.”
“Unfair?”
“He didn’t give his life—as the army says in the letter they sent to my parents—he had it taken from him. It was so meaningless and unnecessary.”
“How is that different from any other death?”
“I don’t know. I will die of cancer. There’s no meaning in that, I suppose.”
“But you say your brother’s death was meaningless and unnecessary and unfair?”
“That’s right. It was.”
“And your parents’ deaths were fair?”
Mohr works himself into a more upright position. “Let’s say theirs were less unfair.”
“And your own?”
He stares at me for a moment, retreating behind the large rims of his glasses. “Less unfair.” He removes his glasses again and jabs his knuckle into his eye. “I’m not crying,” he says, rubbing. “It’s the medication. It dries me out. My eyes get. Irritated.” He replaces his glasses. “The real is the rational and the rational is the real. That’s what Hegel says.” He signals the waitress. “Hegel would probably have said that Jim’s death was world spirit working itself out. I used to think that those big philosophical positions explained things. That they contained truth.”
“And now?”
“Now? I think they are all a pile of shit.”
“And what about the rational and the real?”
“There is nothing rational or real that can’t be undone and destroyed by the smallest dose of absurdity.” He pauses for a moment, licks his lips. “Call it what you want, das Vernunftige, das Wahre, bad luck. If Hegel were alive today he’d probably be a systems analyst at the Pentagon.” He removes his glasses and resumes rubbing his eye. “And if I had any sense I’d go on vacation instead of checking myself into a goddamn hospice.”
“Why don’t you?”
He pauses for a moment. “Because I don’t have an umbrella,” he says, grinning broadly, and when the waitress arrives to take the check she finds us both giggling like schoolboys over a dirty joke.
Mohr pays for his uneaten dinner and for my glass of wine, and we leave the restaurant. I walk with him to his car, parked in a reserved space in front of the library.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says, struggling to fit his key into the frozen lock.
“I’ll walk.”
He opens the door and slides into the driver’s seat. I stand on the sidewalk and watch him maneuver himself into position behind the wheel. The engine comes to life. He rolls down the window. “Sure you don’t want a ride?”
“No thanks.” I wave and start off in the direction of home. Mohr passes me slowly, honks his horn. He looks so small behind the wheel of the enormous car, protected from the elements outside by a heavy steel and glass exoskeleton, from the elements inside by sophisticated painkillers and who knows what other kinds of medication. He wears a wig to cover his baldness, thick glasses to compensate for myopia, dentures to enable him to eat. I imagine underneath his clothing he is supported by a variety of trusses and bandages and marked with scars where he has been cut open, probed, and explored. The red taillights of his car disappear into the night, carrying his fragile body away in an intricate and ghostly web of technological contingencies and artificial supports.