He awoke in the grass with absolutely no recollection of how he'd gotten there. The broad, dew-laden blades licked and prodded his face, drawing him back to a waking world and dissolving the still-fleeting remnants of his dreams so that only vague impressions of them remained. The particular emotional echo resonating through him as he struggled to his feet, old joints cracking as he applied pressure to his knees, was one of optimism. But here, on the green, relatively well-kept grass of a sprawling cemetery grounds, there was little to encourage such a thing.
Like a street lamp flickering and sputtering before beaming out its pale halo of yellow light, his vision, one of the last facets of perception that he still fully possessed, became clear and focused. This, he realized, was not the first time he'd found himself in this particular graveyard, and he knew that it would not be the last. His own reserved spot was a mere arm's length away, but the stone that stood in front of him, that apparently tested his resolve by being the first object he would see upon waking, bore a familiarity that caused him to turn away and smile, pretending to ignore what had been looming over him as he slept. Etched across the stone was the name Madeleine Bruges, his late wife, accompanied only by the dates of her birth and death.
Once he felt that his brittle body was still in one piece, having stretched the muscles in his shoulders and legs and wiping the clinging drops of dew from his damp night shirt and pajama bottoms, he began the unexpected journey home, which consisted of roughly a mile and a half of arduous trekking across a bank of rolling hills and through a slightly forested park. The dawn had only just begun to break, so his only concern was reaching home before he could be seen and gawked over by passing joggers and early morning travelers.
Fortunately, Oscar Bruges was accustomed to walking great distances, an ability made credible by his experience as a marathon runner in his younger days and the simple fact that he, at present, did not own a vehicle. If his mind was set on a particular destination, he would walk there. If, however, it proved to be too great a distance or too inconvenient for conventional foot traffic, he would swiftly decide that it was not a place worth visiting, and nothing could dissuade him.
As he crested the first hill along his homeward path, he resolved that the next time he climbed into his old bed with its wide, knotted walnut headboard, he would wear a comfortable pair of sneakers. The rest of the hills gave him little trouble, save for the pebbles that became lodged between his toes when he was forced to abandon the deteriorating footpath and instead walk alongside a rough road that barely deserved to be called paved. He paused briefly in the park to rest his feet, strolled in circles through the thick, cool grass and then found a comfortable eastward-facing bench, from which he observed the sun fully rising from the far, hilly horizon. Quite satisfied with his morning so far, Oscar quickly returned to his path, arriving home just before six o'clock, the time at which his alarm clock was set to stir him from his supposed sleep.
He double-checked the calendar hanging from the kitchen wall, which assured him that today was Saturday. On an ordinary Saturday, he would've woken to his alarm and then gone through the motions of any other morning--a warm shower and shave, breakfast consisting of one egg scrambled with chopped bits of onions and green peppers and two thick slices of toast slathered in a single pat of butter, and a quick read of the morning paper to scan the headlines and the obituaries for news of any of his old acquaintances--followed by an unanticipated, but inevitable, trip back to bed to sleep away the rest of the morning. This had been his ordinary Saturday morning ritual for the past forty years, even while Madeleine was still alive. But rousing himself from a slumber beside his late wife's grave was anything but normal, and for once, Oscar decided to forego his weekly ode to the most comfortable morning of the week, except, of course, for the shower to wash away the thin layer of perspiration that had coated his skin and gathered in the most unsavory of places.
The water at first stung the raw, blackened soles of his feet, now speckled with small pebble-sized indentations in the hard calluses on his heels, but the stinging became a strange, painful soothing sensation, and the dirt was rinsed away, coalescing in a black, solid ring around the drain. After his shower, throughout which his hips creaked and something in the vicinity of his back popped loudly, he wiped the fog from the bathroom mirror and studied his face, absently straightening the wrinkles that plagued his eyes and cheeks in the name of measuring his accumulated stubble, which he then set about eliminating with an ancient whalebone straight razor Madeleine had gifted to him on his fiftieth birthday.
Finding himself clean and shaven but not the least bit hungry, Oscar then passed at the opportunity to prepare breakfast and instead went straight to work, gliding into his study with less effort than he'd anticipated following the morning's exercise. He sat at the vintage writing desk he'd procured from an antique shop downtown, atop which sat a powder blue Royal typewriter. A solid white sheet of paper had been wound through the carriage, awaiting the click of his fingers to set the process in motion, but he simply sat in the hard, wooden chair, staring at the faded keys without the slightest inkling of how to begin. His eyes wandered to the single sheet of paper that laid face down at the typewriter's side, on which he could discern the faint reversed letters that adorned the opposite side. It was the title of his latest, and last, venture into the world of authoring, and in the past two weeks, it was all that he had managed to complete--A Paperless World: On The Death of the Novel. He frowned at it, unsure even of that meager accomplishment.
More than anything, he desired to find the appropriate words with which to begin, knowing they were somewhere out there, temporarily stricken from his head, like a scientist who's lost a precious formula. He wanted to articulate the decline of human culture and attention span, admonish society for allowing such a breach in the heavy walls that have surrounded and protected man's love of all things considered art and his eagerness to learn and explore for thousands of years, and lament the inevitability of entropy. But the words would not come. Like the novel--not the quality of its prose, but its very being, its physical pages and stiff cardstock or leather-bound covers, its weight as it rests in the hands of an attentive reader--he feared they were lost.
After half an hour of sitting and uneventful pondering, Oscar abandoned his study in favor of a breath of fresh air, as if his morning's journey had never occurred. The fact was that he was well aware of his tendency to sleepwalk in times of particular stress, but never had he found himself so far from home or in a place of such relevance. He wished to pretend that his latest spell had absolutely no deeper meaning, despite the bells ringing in his head as if to draw attention to something he refused to acknowledge.
Along his small, Cape Cod style house ran a mulched path bordered with old crossties that began at the back door and traced the rear edge of the house before branching away at the corner, floating freely across the yard between several plump maple trees before ending at a small free-standing greenhouse. Within were several benches covered with rows of potted tomato plants bearing small green fruit, but at the very center was a miniature water garden, lined with thick black plastic and armed with a pump that assured a slow, steady flow. One end of the pond was dominated by a short, thick tree that grew out of the water, around which the plastic lining had been shaped.
Oscar carefully lowered himself beside the edge of the pond and leaned close to the trunk, upon which he observed a bundle of green roots that had attached themselves to the bark and supported a stem that hung low over the surface of the water. In a month, the orchid would bloom, and he would think of Madeleine again. He hoped by then to have found the words that alluded him, and took some solace in his belief that soon after his book was finished, he would feel the warm embrace of the earth, there beside Madeleine, in a space of his very own.
Like a street lamp flickering and sputtering before beaming out its pale halo of yellow light, his vision, one of the last facets of perception that he still fully possessed, became clear and focused. This, he realized, was not the first time he'd found himself in this particular graveyard, and he knew that it would not be the last. His own reserved spot was a mere arm's length away, but the stone that stood in front of him, that apparently tested his resolve by being the first object he would see upon waking, bore a familiarity that caused him to turn away and smile, pretending to ignore what had been looming over him as he slept. Etched across the stone was the name Madeleine Bruges, his late wife, accompanied only by the dates of her birth and death.
Once he felt that his brittle body was still in one piece, having stretched the muscles in his shoulders and legs and wiping the clinging drops of dew from his damp night shirt and pajama bottoms, he began the unexpected journey home, which consisted of roughly a mile and a half of arduous trekking across a bank of rolling hills and through a slightly forested park. The dawn had only just begun to break, so his only concern was reaching home before he could be seen and gawked over by passing joggers and early morning travelers.
Fortunately, Oscar Bruges was accustomed to walking great distances, an ability made credible by his experience as a marathon runner in his younger days and the simple fact that he, at present, did not own a vehicle. If his mind was set on a particular destination, he would walk there. If, however, it proved to be too great a distance or too inconvenient for conventional foot traffic, he would swiftly decide that it was not a place worth visiting, and nothing could dissuade him.
As he crested the first hill along his homeward path, he resolved that the next time he climbed into his old bed with its wide, knotted walnut headboard, he would wear a comfortable pair of sneakers. The rest of the hills gave him little trouble, save for the pebbles that became lodged between his toes when he was forced to abandon the deteriorating footpath and instead walk alongside a rough road that barely deserved to be called paved. He paused briefly in the park to rest his feet, strolled in circles through the thick, cool grass and then found a comfortable eastward-facing bench, from which he observed the sun fully rising from the far, hilly horizon. Quite satisfied with his morning so far, Oscar quickly returned to his path, arriving home just before six o'clock, the time at which his alarm clock was set to stir him from his supposed sleep.
He double-checked the calendar hanging from the kitchen wall, which assured him that today was Saturday. On an ordinary Saturday, he would've woken to his alarm and then gone through the motions of any other morning--a warm shower and shave, breakfast consisting of one egg scrambled with chopped bits of onions and green peppers and two thick slices of toast slathered in a single pat of butter, and a quick read of the morning paper to scan the headlines and the obituaries for news of any of his old acquaintances--followed by an unanticipated, but inevitable, trip back to bed to sleep away the rest of the morning. This had been his ordinary Saturday morning ritual for the past forty years, even while Madeleine was still alive. But rousing himself from a slumber beside his late wife's grave was anything but normal, and for once, Oscar decided to forego his weekly ode to the most comfortable morning of the week, except, of course, for the shower to wash away the thin layer of perspiration that had coated his skin and gathered in the most unsavory of places.
The water at first stung the raw, blackened soles of his feet, now speckled with small pebble-sized indentations in the hard calluses on his heels, but the stinging became a strange, painful soothing sensation, and the dirt was rinsed away, coalescing in a black, solid ring around the drain. After his shower, throughout which his hips creaked and something in the vicinity of his back popped loudly, he wiped the fog from the bathroom mirror and studied his face, absently straightening the wrinkles that plagued his eyes and cheeks in the name of measuring his accumulated stubble, which he then set about eliminating with an ancient whalebone straight razor Madeleine had gifted to him on his fiftieth birthday.
Finding himself clean and shaven but not the least bit hungry, Oscar then passed at the opportunity to prepare breakfast and instead went straight to work, gliding into his study with less effort than he'd anticipated following the morning's exercise. He sat at the vintage writing desk he'd procured from an antique shop downtown, atop which sat a powder blue Royal typewriter. A solid white sheet of paper had been wound through the carriage, awaiting the click of his fingers to set the process in motion, but he simply sat in the hard, wooden chair, staring at the faded keys without the slightest inkling of how to begin. His eyes wandered to the single sheet of paper that laid face down at the typewriter's side, on which he could discern the faint reversed letters that adorned the opposite side. It was the title of his latest, and last, venture into the world of authoring, and in the past two weeks, it was all that he had managed to complete--A Paperless World: On The Death of the Novel. He frowned at it, unsure even of that meager accomplishment.
More than anything, he desired to find the appropriate words with which to begin, knowing they were somewhere out there, temporarily stricken from his head, like a scientist who's lost a precious formula. He wanted to articulate the decline of human culture and attention span, admonish society for allowing such a breach in the heavy walls that have surrounded and protected man's love of all things considered art and his eagerness to learn and explore for thousands of years, and lament the inevitability of entropy. But the words would not come. Like the novel--not the quality of its prose, but its very being, its physical pages and stiff cardstock or leather-bound covers, its weight as it rests in the hands of an attentive reader--he feared they were lost.
After half an hour of sitting and uneventful pondering, Oscar abandoned his study in favor of a breath of fresh air, as if his morning's journey had never occurred. The fact was that he was well aware of his tendency to sleepwalk in times of particular stress, but never had he found himself so far from home or in a place of such relevance. He wished to pretend that his latest spell had absolutely no deeper meaning, despite the bells ringing in his head as if to draw attention to something he refused to acknowledge.
Along his small, Cape Cod style house ran a mulched path bordered with old crossties that began at the back door and traced the rear edge of the house before branching away at the corner, floating freely across the yard between several plump maple trees before ending at a small free-standing greenhouse. Within were several benches covered with rows of potted tomato plants bearing small green fruit, but at the very center was a miniature water garden, lined with thick black plastic and armed with a pump that assured a slow, steady flow. One end of the pond was dominated by a short, thick tree that grew out of the water, around which the plastic lining had been shaped.
Oscar carefully lowered himself beside the edge of the pond and leaned close to the trunk, upon which he observed a bundle of green roots that had attached themselves to the bark and supported a stem that hung low over the surface of the water. In a month, the orchid would bloom, and he would think of Madeleine again. He hoped by then to have found the words that alluded him, and took some solace in his belief that soon after his book was finished, he would feel the warm embrace of the earth, there beside Madeleine, in a space of his very own.
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