Zero Sum by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-05-26T12:00:00+00:00

There’s a joke to be made here but The Suicide can’t think of it just now.

Next what’s required is a chair. A solid chair. A chair that will not wobble, still less shatter beneath his weight.

No chair in the basement. Will have to bring a chair downstairs. Damn.

Practical matters have never been The Suicide’s forte. Long before the “virtual” world was invented, The Suicide dwelt there.

Taking a grudging pleasure in the task, hauling a chair downstairs, bumping against the wall with it … A vague smile plays about The Suicide’s lips, the damned (clumsy) chair will have to be carried back upstairs. “But not by moi.”

As he’d been pleased with himself, first time he’d voted, aged twenty-one, in the sour-tasting aftermath of 9/11, in a middle-scale suburb of Cleveland managing to pull the voting booth lever that jerked the curtain closed behind him, then pulling the lever in what would be a counter motion to open it again without mishap and in this way confounding the foolish but obsessive worry that his votes would be nullified by a rash miscalculation opening the curtain.

All this while listening for Wendy to return … (Would he hear the car pulling up beside the kitchen door? He would hear Wendy coming into the kitchen, he was sure.)

Is it too late to leave a note? To assure his wife it is not your fault, darling.

Do not blame yourself, darling.

(Maudlin, mawkish. Impossible!)

(Rare for The Suicide to call his wife “darling”—he’d sometimes called her “darling” in an arch emulation of Ronald Colman in a forties movie—but not for years. Yet to call her “Wendy” seems wrong also for the name “Wendy” suggests a child’s nursery, dolls, dollhouse, insipid dolls that squeak Ma-ma! when their torsos are squeezed.)

(Why in Christ’s sake did he marry a woman named Wendy, a diminutive for which there exists no formal name? What had he been thinking? At the age of almost-forty The Suicide has too much pride for his death to be associated with anything silly.)

Anyway, no time for a suicide note, that would require days, weeks. Coiled in compulsive revising as in the coils of Laocoön. And what time is it?—sands of time running out.

She has run out. Left him alone.

(Alone? He is gripped with something like terror, the very word—alone.)

Calling your bluff, Harold, Jr. Didn’t think anyone ever would, did you?

He realizes that he has been listening for her to return, anxiously. He’d been certain that by now she’d have returned. Can’t recall what the appointment was, she’d told him but he hadn’t actually heard. Stunned that she would leave the house, abandon him.

Certain that she will return. In time …

Change her mind, decide to return.

Any minute now the vehicle in the driveway, kitchen door pushed open. Hello? I’m back. Changed my mind. Are you upstairs? Hon, where are you? Shall I bring you a Coke?

(Actually he’d like a Coke. A rush of fizzy chemicals, caffeine.)

(He will get a Coke for himself. He will swallow down a small selection of panic-soothing pills.

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