At night, he is a single man. He patterns his movements after Proust, but mostly watches television on DVD, the better to cleave against the commercials, and keep the good stuff coming. He would never be so unreasonable as to call his facts fate. He knows what he is doing and is doing it quite well, as well as one can, the knowing thing.
In his sleep he does have dreams. Dreams as questions asked, and the answer is often “fish”. He gets confused in his dreams because he does not find fish fascinating, but they always tend to take such an important part of them. He would prefer his dreams to be more like his waking night, not so much as married to a fish.
In the morning, he’s a married man again and kisses his wife awake, who shakes at the quake of the touch, always expected, and always unearned.
He butters her bagel the way she likes it, softly. But she likes it with raspberry jam too, and he always forgets that.
He goes out into the world, not a single man, but a man amongst men, all attempting their own ownership. Every single man he meets fills him with a singular sense of defeat. He knows he is better than this, this goddamn man with no teeth demanding too much for a newspaper, this other man who screams “Next! Next!” when everyone is moving in line perfectly fine. This man who smells bad on the subway and finds it his right to lean into him and his freshly dry-cleaned shirt.
He spends the rest of his day day-dreaming of the house by the lake in Michigan where he and his father used to fish, never catching any, where his father told him
“You’re lucky, son. You’re young, and single, and you have your whole life ahead of you.”
