Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels

Author:Sean Michaels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

FRIDAY

I WOKE up on my stomach. In my bed, on my stomach, even though I never sleep on my stomach. I had taken off my clothes, but my socks were still on. Nude under the comforter, I had my face smushed against a pillow, and to be honest it felt good. I slid one hand along the mattress and scratched my thigh. I couldn’t remember arriving back in the hotel, but I remembered getting undressed: folding my dress, removing my undergarments, placing the dirty laundry in the wastepaper basket where I was amassing dirty laundry. I remembered hanging my tricorne hat on the hook beside the door. I remembered laughing at myself in the mirror, my freckled, naked shoulders, the abstract expressionism painted across my face. Now those dazzle patterns were smeared onto the cotton. I felt the residue of my dreams like a sunburn, hot and prickly under my skin. I had never been one to suffer hangovers and I didn’t feel one now. Thirsty, yes, and my body ached, like a sheet that needed smoothing, but mostly I was filled with a sense of freedom, of expanding time. The light in the room seemed suspended. It touched nothing. What time was it? It could be any time.

It was 11:41 a.m. The clock radio showed the time in hard white numerals, like a teacher’s chalkboard equation, and abruptly I realized how much I had slept in. “Oh, Mole,” I said to myself, rolling onto my back and sitting up. This feeling was familiar—not because I am late very often but the opposite: because I am scared of being late, because at seventy-five years old I am still haunted by dreams where I’m late for a class, or to pick up Courtney from Larry’s, or Mother from a doctor’s appointment. Truancy is one of my conscience’s running themes. I am a poet; I shouldn’t keep strict hours. Yet I was afraid to be perceived as negligent, or lazy. Was it Larry I had learned this from? No, it was Mother, who was often late. What would Yoav think of the illustrious Marian Ffarmer rolling in at noon? Never mind Yoav, what would Haskett think? Or Lausanne? I could tell them I was just taking my time, reflecting. I would tell them this. An old woman, a celebrated artist, taking it slow. “Well, there’s no hurrying inspiration!” Perhaps it would even burnish me in their eyes—prove that I was unintimidated by the commission. A self-possessed freewoman, not a vassal of the Company and its timetable. Pulitzer Prize–winning, ever-patient poet Marian Ffarmer. Recipient of the National Medal for Literature. I arrive at two and leave by four.

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