What I Counted

What I Counted

The white sweater goes in the sink first. Cold water, never warm, because heat sets soot into wool and then it stays there for good. I work the front of it with both thumbs until the gray lifts off and clouds the basin, and I change the water twice.

He has been gone four hours with the tin.

I know what is in that tin. I have known since my second winter in this house, and for 20 years it sits under a course of brick where somebody puts it, which is the only place it does no harm.

I wring the sweater out, roll it in a towel, and lay it flat on the rack by the radiator. Then I sweep the hall runner and carry the dustpan out the back. The second step of the porch does not make a sound tonight.

At six I make him a sandwich. Turkey, mustard on one slice, no tomato, because tomato turns the bread soft by the time he remembers that eating is a thing people do. I cut it corner to corner and set it on the desk on a white plate.

In April I move the knives to the top of the pantry and tell him the drawer is warped. I carry a card in my wallet with his allergies on it, and the name of the compound he cannot be given, and the number of a hospital in Poughkeepsie that has his chart. None of that is in any report.

I measure the living room our first week up here. Nineteen feet six by 22 feet even, ceiling at eight foot two, and I draw it to scale on graph paper with the door swings and the outlets marked, the way I would draw any site before I put a shovel in it. It is a habit from work. It is also how I know, in March, that the room runs about seven feet short of the foundation it is sitting on.

He gets back at dusk. I hear the car, then the kitchen faucet opening all the way, then a man being sick into a steel sink.

I stand at the end of the hall with a stack of folded sheets over my arm, and I count. It runs 50 seconds. I do not go in to him.

When it stops I set a glass of water on the counter where he will find it and go upstairs to strip the guest bed.

Later he is at the desk with the notebook open and the pen moving. His handwriting from across a room is a field of small even marks, margins true, nothing crossed out. A man who has just learned what his parents have made of him is writing it down in a fair hand.

I stand in the doorway with the sheets still over my arm. I do not go in.

"Did you play all of them?" I ask.

He does not look up, which is the answer.

* * *

Saturday is the day I mix.

I clear the kitchen table, lay down butcher paper, and set out the scale. The readout sits at 90 before I pour anything into the jar, so I zero it and start again.

Base oil to 90 grams. Then the tincture, amber glass, the herb smell coming up musty the second the stopper leaves the neck. Then the mint fraction out of a dropper, cold, counted.

The slip that comes in the carton says 12 drops. I give him eight. I have been giving him eight since the spring before last, and the column on the form says 12 every month in my own handwriting, and no one has ever asked me about it.

I cap the bottle, label it in pencil with the date, and wipe the counter down twice. The smell holds in the kitchen about an hour. Musty herbs and cold mint, the same as it has been for 11 years. I can still find it on the backs of my own hands two days later.

My log is a green site notebook, the same kind I use for grading plans and drainage runs. Six columns, ruled out with a scale rule.

Date. Time of application. Seconds to numbness. Hours slept. Words on the page the next day. Whether he says a name in the night.

It is 40 seconds. From the first pass at the crown of his head to the point where his hands go open on the arms of the chair is 40 seconds. I have timed it against a second hand more nights than I can count. It has never been 39 and it has never been 41.

Under the columns I keep one line nobody asks me for. His weight. He is down 14 pounds since April.

April is when I stop. I carry my pillow across the hall and leave the bottle in the drawer and let him have his own head back, and the dreams come up out of him like water finding a crack. I write improving on the form that month. Nothing about that is an accident.

* * *

He comes in from the yard at eight and writes until eleven.

I bring the plate back through at nine. Half the sandwich is still on it, the crust curling. I leave it where it is.

At 1:05 a.m. he puts the pen down. He does not ask about the coffee or the stairs. He asks whether the lecture hall in Albany is chance or whether it is arranged.

"Arranged," I say.

"By who."

"By the people who paid for the house you grew up in."

I am in the doorway. I stay in the doorway the whole hour, shoulder against the frame, because from there I can see both of his hands and the front window at the same time. Out the window the flag on the mailbox is already up, and I have not put anything in it yet.

Twenty years ago I am a year out of school with a drafting table, two built jobs in a portfolio, and $31,000 of debt. A man I never see a second time buys me lunch in Albany and explains that there is a young writer in this state who will not live through his own head without somebody in the room with him, and that the work is to be that somebody. I take it. I am 26, and I believe the part about the room, and I believe it still.

"Eleven years," James says. "The patience. The oil every night. All of it work?"

"At the start."

He says a word about laboratory animals. I let him have it and I do not argue any part of it. Twenty years, and he is 46 years old and breathing and putting sentences on paper, and that is the one column in the notebook I keep for myself.

He asks me about A then. I give him the one sentence I have ever been given about A, which I understand no better than he does, and I watch it go into him and do its damage. I am not allowed the rest. I have never been given the rest.

Nine times in 11 years I put in a written recommendation to end it. I keep the carbons in a folder behind the seed packets in the garage, and the answer is the same every time, which is no answer, which is a new carton on the porch.

He is finished at last. He puts both hands flat on the desk and says he needs to sleep, and then he says please.

The bottle is already out. He takes it from the drawer himself before any of this starts, and the cap is off and lying on its side on the blotter, and he picks the bottle up and holds it out to me without turning his head. I take it out of his hand. That is the first time all night either of us touches the other.

The mantel clock says 2:35 when I start. It says 2:41 when his breathing changes.

I write both down.

* * *

After, I clean.

I sweep the broken brick and the gray mortar out of the corner and carry it to the barrel in the yard in four trips. I wipe the desk down to the grain and run a damp cloth along the baseboards, where the dust from the wall has drifted and settled in a line. I wash the plate. The room takes two hours and it ends up better than it has looked in all the weeks we have been in it.

There are two scratches on the back of his left hand, wrist to knuckles. I clean them with peroxide at 3:20, and they are dry and closed before I turn off the lamp.

The tapes go into a shoe box with the notebook and the player. I count them in and there are five. I count them again with the lid in my hand, because I am a person who counts twice, and there are five.

On the middle of the oak table there is a square of white paper folded in four. I open it out flat. I read the one line inside it, in his handwriting, pressed hard enough to go through the page. I fold it back along the same creases and set it down exactly where it is sitting, and I do not put it in the log and I do not say it on the phone.

The form goes in the mailbox at the end of the walk. Number 217, nine boxes, block capitals, my initials in the corner. Under recommendation I write the same word I have written nine times. Close. I leave the box door open so the driver can see it from the road.

Last month's carbon comes back on Tuesday with a column filled in that I leave blank. Nine dates in April, in a small backhand that is not mine, and every one of them is a night I skip the oil and tell nobody at all.

I carry the shoe box out to the car at 3:40 and drive south with the heat on my feet and the window down two inches.

The number rings three times. The man who answers has never given me a name and has never once asked how I am.

"Is he down?"

"Yes."

"Anything written?"

"No," I say.

"Usual place. Before light."

I put the phone face down on the seat. There is a gas station on the highway outside Poughkeepsie with a floodlight over the air pump, and I pull in under it because my hands want a job, and I open the box on the passenger seat to count one more time.

There are four.