Michael Pikna
Death in the Oatmeal
At fifty, Matt Sidlicki began to think of his life as a poem, not because it had been particularly beautiful or artistic, but because, like any poem he had read in Intro to Literary Studies in his freshman year at Fairleigh Dickinson, he didn’t understand it. What it came down to was death. Specifically, his own. Not having been burdened by an introspective nature, he’d gone through life, if not happy, at least happily ignorant of what ultimately awaited him. Then he turned fifty, and it was as though whatever was buffering him-time, a thick skin, reality TV-had worn thin enough for him to finally sense the imminence of his own demise.
He began to see death in unexpected places: in the pasty oatmeal he ate every morning, the raisins staring up at him like the very eyes of death; in the necropolis of moldy shower-tiles; in the corners of his boss’s mouth, where the white flecks formed as he seized and contorted about dwindling profit margins; in the botoxed faces of news anchors; and in the least likely of all places, the transmutation of winter into spring, with the shameless vying for life in the natural order, one plant choking off another, one chick elbowing another out of the nest and onto the concrete of Matt’s front stoop where it lay with the morning paper as a grisly reminder of what was to come.
During the day Matt was able to distract himself somewhat from thoughts of death by the quotidian tasks at hand and by the occasional fantasy involving the office intern. At night he was more vulnerable, and the thought that his looming death was ruining his life assaulted him in the dark while he lay in bed, his wife snorkeling through sleep under the covers next to him as she had throughout their marriage, her feet kicking and her hands flapping as though their bed were a coral reef and she a freckled tourist on her honeymoon again in Key Largo.
At first, Matt dealt with his disturbing nocturnal awareness by pilfering his wife’s Valium, but eventually he began to feel guilty that his midlife crisis, if that’s what it was, should have such little overall impact on his slumber. And he did have the thought, possibly even an insight, that avoidance could have larger consequences down the road, such as impotence or even hair loss. So, with a greater, albeit unclear good in mind, he stopped taking the Valium and used the awake time in bed to put his life into some kind of perspective. One way he thought to do this was to quantify his life in terms of how he’d spent his time up until now. He took a cumulative approach because it satisfied his linear, bottom-line sensibilities, and in this way he calculated that so far he’d spent over sixteen years asleep, almost 11,000 eight-hour days at work, over 7,500 hours driving to and from work, and, at the rate of two hours a day since the age of three, a little over 35,000 hours watching TV.
These facts did not enlighten Matt, yet they made him feel more secure in a way that only a man who had begun to organize the tools in his garage according to how likely they were to maim him could understand. So he continued in this vein, trying to sum up the time spent in life’s more trivial pursuits: 18,000 hours eating, more than 30,000 hours moving his bowels, 600 hours mowing the lawn since he got married. The figures, so fantastical when connected to the pedestrian aspects of everyday life, tickled him, and he chuckled out loud, heedless of his sleeping wife, who rarely came up for air as she swam for the morning shore.
Thus encouraged, he tried to gauge how much time he had spent masturbating–after all, this was an activity he had been engaging in, with staggering capacity, since his early teens, and it behooved his burgeoning sense of perspective to have an accounting of it firmly in hand, as it were. Yet, he could no more keep from imagining certain masturbatory fantasies as he tallied the self-abuse score than Pavlov’s dogs could keep from salivating when they heard that bell, and so his calculations became muddled and his conclusions spurious.
He needed to clear his head and he knew of only one way to do that. Once upon a time, there would have been another way, a time when both he and his wife slept naked, a time when the frisson of even casual contact under the covers would have caused a spontaneous tenting of the sheets. He looked over at his wife now; she slept on her stomach and emitted bubbling pea soup sounds from her mouth.
She was still a mystery to Matt, who had gone about his marriage with the attentiveness of someone recording the habits of a rare and elusive creature. He knew how to make her laugh and what would make her flinch. He knew when she needed him and when he should run for cover. He not only knew what she liked and disliked, but what she would mull over, what would make her squint with uncertainty. He could predict from her mood during the day the stroke she would use in her aquatic dreams at night. He knew her body better than he did his own; he had mapped every inch of it at a time when they were both discovering new territories-although he would be hard pressed to say when he had last planted a flag-and had never lost his appreciation of it, not through a provocative period of deforestation, not during the inevitable phase of sprawl, and not during the most recent transition into untilled idleness. He knew everything about his wife that was possible for a man to know, and yet no matter how much he thought he knew about her, it didn’t amount to much. She still managed to surprise him.
He got out of bed and, as quietly as he could, he put on his watch, robe, and slippers, and tucked a small bottle of hand lotion into a pocket of his robe. Before he left the bedroom, he caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror and was dismayed by how much he resembled his father just before he died.
In the study downstairs, he closed and locked the door behind him. The moonlight projecting through the three cottage-style windows rendered lamplight unnecessary for the moment. He sat at his desk and opened the bottom right drawer. From a file marked Taxes, he retrieved a recent advertisement for Bra Smyth, the closest any pictures in his possession came to resembling pornography. Matt was not offended by pornography so much as he was by the idea that, after he died, someone would go through his things, find the salacious material, and think him a pervert. (He was fairly certain his wife would not be the one to find it, given her aversion to the details of their financial affairs, but he could not be certain that whoever did wouldn’t report their findings to her. She would be hurt, and at least a little disgusted with him, and while he knew he would be dead and buried and unable to care what his wife might think, the thought, now, while he was alive, that he might do something as callus as fail to cover up his excessive masturbating and cause her more grief was unbearable.) Victoria’s Secret was too risky, but Bra Smyth was stimulating enough to meet his needs, yet innocent enough to lead whoever might discover it to consider him merely odd or, even better, absentminded-a characterization he could live with, or in this case, die with. They might say: Oh, hey, look! He must’ve grabbed this off the counter with the W-2s and other tax whatnot and stuffed it in the file. What a scatterbrain! They might smile and shake their head, maybe even get misty-eyed as they thought of a way to use it in an anecdote when they spoke of him.
He took off his watch and propped the luminescent dial with its sweeping second-hand at a forty-five degree angle on the desk in front of him. He would clear his head, and, by timing himself, would also do some research that would aid any future calculations. He had a moment’s pause about the confounding variable the hand lotion might pose-as a young man he had never needed any lubrication; in fact, there were a few embarrassing occasions when he had needed no friction whatsoever. He decided he would figure it out later, and it was when he reached for the lamp on the corner of his desk, stretched out with his line of sight slanting up and out the window to his roof, that he saw him.
He came out of the dormer window like a second-story man, his movements fluid and cat-like, and crouched at the roof’s edge. He looked to his left, where an old apple tree’s limbs lent a relatively easy access to the ground, then down and to his right, where his eyes, for a brief moment, seemed to connect with Matt’s. Then he jumped, hitting the soft turf and rolling as if he’d been doing it all his life. He hitched up his baggy jeans and brushed off his dark hoody, and although it was night and his head cowled Matt recognized the familiar smile-it belonged to the moonlight and to those who were young and brazenly alive, and it had once belonged to Matt.
Matt lived in the house he had inherited after all the kielbasa and cheese pierogi with fried bacon and pork-stuffed golabki had congealed in his father’s arteries and after his mother, never the grandmotherly type, had succumbed to her widowed sister’s enticements of a more affable and hip-friendly climate. He had come out of that window many times as a boy, sometimes simply to escape the muggy heat of his room, sitting on the still-warm shingles in his underwear, trying to lure a breeze his way, but more often to steal away and blend in with the crickets and night air, walking the unlit roads and ducking into the woods or behind a tree whenever a car approached. He would come back mosquito-bitten and scratched and very happy.
So when he saw his youngest son come out of the same window, some three-and-a-half decades later, he felt a pang in his chest and, never having had one so intense, mistook it for a heart attack. By the time he realized it was simply a strong emotion and not something requiring defibrillation, his son was gone. The decision to open the window, push out the screen, and follow him was not made intellectually, but viscerally, as though his own life force was having contractions and pushing him out of the house.
Once outside, Matt did not know what to do. Every time he had a thought that hinted at a plan or simply a direction, he was distracted by what he was feeling. It was the same longing he had felt all those years ago as a boy perched on the roof, on the brink of manhood, only now it was tinged with something else: panic, desperation, acid reflux. He tried to think logically, but logic would not explain his exit through the window, nor his presence in his front yard at an ungodly hour of the night. And then he had the thought-again, possibly an insight-that it was his thoughts that were distracting him.
So he started walking and breathing the perky spring air, and it was good. He was propelled down the driveway by an urge he understood no better than he had thirty-five years ago, his tender feet shod against the gravel where once his well-callused soles would have sufficed. At the mailbox, he made a left at the behest of either an old memory residing in his legs or an ache from torn cartilage in his left knee that disposed him to left turns. Either way, he was heading down the road with no clear idea of where he was going. He concentrated on the way his feet connected with the road, the way it joined him perfectly with the world and the people on it, the people who made the road he now treaded. That got him to thinking of the asphalt and the petroleum that went into it and the high cost of oil and the increasing amount of money he was spending on gas each week and before he knew it he walked right in to Stan Wallman’s mailbox and knocked it over. That set a dog barking somewhere, and while Matt swore and hopped around on one foot, Stan’s porch light popped on, spoiling the moonlight and Matt’s mood. Although Stan’s motion detector was not sensitive enough to pick up the commotion at the end of his long drive, his nerves were, having been frayed by a long divorce and a recent allegation by one of his high school students. With his job in limbo, his ex-wife in warmer climes, and his kids old enough to have their own lives, Stan had little to do but watch Barbara Streisand movies while he lay in wait for whoever kept pushing over his mailbox, sharpening his vigilance all the while with strong coffee and persecutory delusions, and then drinking himself to sleep by dawn.
Matt quickly righted the mailbox and tamped the soft earth, tilled by frequent toppling, and moved on before the spring in Stan’s screen door creaked its alarm. By the time it slammed, Matt had already gained back his momentum and surrendered once again to memories that lay deep within his muscle and bone and tendon, memories that, he was certain, preceded his own existence. He focused on the rudiments of walking, as if he were learning all over again, the swinging of his arms, the pronation of his feet. In this way he was able to cleanse his thoughts of their stickiness, of their static cling, to let them go wherever thoughts go when they are not needed.
He meandered down the winding roads and across a bridge kids jumped from in the summer and along a dirt road hugging the river to a spot where the brave could swing out on a thick rope over the placid water and knife down so far their feet sometimes touched the muddy bottom. He was breathing hard and sweating lightly in the cool air. He felt amazing. His back, for once, had no complaints, and his knee had loosened up. His senses validated him, testified to his existence. He felt real.
He stopped when he heard laughter distinguish itself from the purling river. Treading lightly, he maneuvered himself to a spot behind a rock where he spied his son and a girl preparing to launch themselves into the river. He saw only their silhouettes from the side and the bobbing ember of the cigarette they shared. He heard their voices hushed in excitement, but not their words. The girl crouched with her feet around a knot in the rope, her hands gripping the rope above her, her head thrown back. His son smoked with one hand and pulled at the rope above her with his other hand, playing at releasing the rope. The girl squealed the way teenaged girls do, a sound that normally would elicit from Matt the urge to stab his ears repeatedly with something long and sharp, but now it stirred something inside him, caused a bubble to rise in his chest, and he realized too late that he was going to laugh.
He stifled it with a hand, but some of it spilled out and carried to the two young night birds, and with the flick of a cigarette they took flight. The lower knot on the rope wedged between his son’s feet, his hands gripped above the girl’s, they flew down the embankment in a creaking of tree limb and rope, and as they came out of the tree’s shadow and rode impossibly high for two mere children, he saw that the moonlight had turned their skin silver and that they were completely naked. When the rope achieved its highest arc they let go and fell with grace into the water.
Matt stood holding the end of the rope. Until tonight, he had not realized how insulated he was from the natural world, how cut off he was from what could be felt. He had shucked his robe and pajamas as though they were the accumulated layers of fear obfuscating his life. Tonight he would cleanse himself in the river and re-initiate himself into the world. For the first time in many years, he was not afraid.
He pulled back on the rope and hopped up to a crouch on the lower knot. He hugged the rope as he descended, noting absently the way the rope abraded the insides of his thighs. As he reached the lowest point of the rope’s arc, he felt his ankles bow against the force of his downward momentum and an instant later they slipped off the knot entirely. He would have fallen in at that point had it not been for the reflexive squeezing together of his thighs and the consequent mashing of his genitals by the knot. Pulled taught against it like a yo-yo on a string and disoriented by the explosion of pain, he leaned back and pinwheeled off the rope, completing one full revolution before slapping the water like a whale’s tail. Any wind left in him after the knot’s curt introduction to his testicles was knocked free, and he came to the surface wild-eyed and coughing up river water. After swimming half-way to the wrong bank, he turned and labored back, hoping the frigid water would not cause him to go into shock. The current, lazy though it was, took him farther along because of his errant sense of direction, and he washed up on a less than hospitable embankment, scratched and muddied and vomiting river water.
In defense against the cold, Matt’s exposed parts began to shrink, pucker, and horripilate. He climbed and shivered up the embankment, danced like a fire-walker over stones in the dirt road and back to the jumping-off point, only to find his clothes gone. After a cursory and pointless search, he swore under his breath for the second time that evening, but there was no commiseration forthcoming, only the chuckling of the river.
Matt was not a vindictive person, but tonight he harbored vindictive thoughts, allowing them to fraternize in his head like ex-cons in a halfway house. They gave him focus as he walked home under a moon whose light made no concessions to his fifty-year-old drooping backside and developing man-breasts. They made him giddy with revenge scenarios involving manual labor and community colleges-plots only a father of a teenaged boy can imagine.
Owing to the rural setting, the lateness of the hour, and the fact that it was a weeknight, he had to dash into the woods only once when a car approached, and was able to avoid detection of his naked presence on the back roads until he reached Stan’s mailbox. Stan sat on a wide stone seat cleverly built into a retaining wall of his drive, as though one of the more popular ways to kill time in this area was to wait for the mail. He held a lit cigarette in one hand and a pint of something in the other. He stared at Matt, who in turn stared at the mailbox he had recently righted and which now lay again on the ground.
Stan pulled on the cigarette. With the bottle, he pointed at the mailbox and said, “The handiwork of your son, I’m afraid. And an accomplice.”
Only a short time earlier, Matt would have championed his son with a smooth articulation of words, but now he gave him up with a one-word eruption: “Yup.”
As though in reward for his correct response, Stan held out the bottle and scooted over. Matt sat down, at once appreciative of Stan’s tact regarding of his lack of attire and uneasy about Stan’s willingness to sit next to a naked man. Matt accepted the bottle and then wondered whether it would exceed the bounds of civility if he used Stan’s shirt to wipe away his saliva. In the end he decided that the scotch would kill both Stan’s germs and any E-coli swimming around the river water in his gut.
The smell of freshly turned earth wafted over to them as they sat quietly trading sips, like two gravediggers taking a break in the sepulchral silence.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Stan said.
“What is?”
Stan was not in the mood for answering questions; instead he took a long swallow and leaned in conspiratorially to ask another: “Ever think about ending it?”
Under different circumstances, Matt might have thought the question incongruous to say the least, but he was tired and cold and there had been very little this evening that had been congruent with his expectations. He thought about equivocating, about pretending he did not know what Stan was talking about, but there was something about the hour and the situation that called for the unadorned truth. “No, but I think about it ending. A lot.”
“These days about the only thing that gives me comfort is knowing I can end it, if I want to. It keeps me sane. Keeps me here. Kind of like the alcoholic who quit drinking years ago, but keeps an unopened bottle around. Somehow it helps him hold onto the wagon.” Stan passed the bottle to Matt.
“Well, here’s to a firm grip,” Matt said, and he raised the bottle to his lips.
Stan stared straight ahead.
“Stan, are you OK?”
Stan smiled and said, “That’s rather an odd question coming from you, don’t you think? Given the circumstances?”
“Touche.” Matt handed the bottle back to Stan and stood. He studied the prone mailbox for a long moment. It had fallen and been resurrected many times. On Saturday, he would come back with his son and anchor it properly with cement. To Stan, he said simply, “I’ll take care of this.”
Stan shrugged, as if he didn’t care about it anymore, as if having another question to embrace was more important than having an answer. “OK,” he said. “But remember: Proper attire required.”
Matt lay on top of the covers in the robe and pajamas he’d found in a pile outside the open study window. He didn’t know exactly what he was feeling–he usually relied on his wife to inform him–but he didn’t think he was angry anymore. He supposed he was in shock, and what shocked him the most was not the near death experience in the river or trading swigs of scotch with a neighbor who was comforted by death in the same way Matt was comforted by his 401-K. No, what had shocked him most was the knowledge that the life he had led as a boy had continued without him.
When he’d gone through the window in the study, he had the feeling was on the verge of remembering something vital, something he had carried instinctively in the bone and sinew of his youth, something that couldn’t be explained, only felt. And he had felt something, hadn’t he? It had charged him, enlivened him. For a brief time tonight, he had retrieved something from his youth, something that couldn’t be kept in his head like a fact, but only experienced. It couldn’t be counted or measured. If his life was a poem, maybe it didn’t need to be explained or evaluated or totted up. It was his last insight of the night, and in the spirit of that insight, he tried not to count how many he’d had. Instead, he simply lay there, smelling vaguely of river mud, and watched his wife. For the moment, she lay still, perhaps beached on a sandbar. She looked content.
He placed his hand on her belly and felt the gentle rise and fall of her breathing. After a moment, she opened her eyes and frowned at him. He saw some sort of recognition light in her eyes. Her frown resolved into the knowing smile she used to wear on her face as she woke on Saturday mornings before they had kids; it contained and evoked every possibility.
“Where’ve you been?” she whispered.
Author Bio
Michael Pikna grew up in northern New Jersey and moved to Colorado in 1977. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Colorado. For the past twenty-six years, he has worked as a counselor for people with severe and persistent mental illnesses. His work has appeared most recently in Nuvein Magazine.
