Telephone

by Percival Everett

unworried. But I moved through my life with caution, and caution in love is the most fatal to true happiness.

So often stories begin at their ends.

We dream, quite simply, so we know we’re not dead.

There was not a cloud in the robin’s egg–blue afternoon sky.

time. I was, to say it again, simply in love with my daughter, with being a father.

I also recalled as I walked how much I had been softened by my daughter. Since her birth I was a much kinder person. Not that I was ever a mean man, but I was, before her, direct enough, blunt enough, and unfeelingly honest enough to come across as an asshole on more than a few occasions. It surprised me when Meg agreed to marry me but perhaps not as much as my asking her.

It struck me, as it always struck me, how little I knew about the stars. No matter how much I read, I never knew more. I lay there with the stars and some shame.

I had never heard such bullshit in my life. I opened my mouth and said, “I have never heard such bullshit in my life.”

He considered the manner in which I ignored him a kind of attention. He and I were not so different.

Regardless, it carried no weight in my real world. There was nothing for me to do, say, or consider. As that had never stopped me before, my never having been a depository of good or even common sense, I opened my computer, logged onto eBay, and looked to order something else from the vendor who had sold me the jacket. I found and bought a shirt with two flapped breast pockets.

The worst feeling in the world is knowing your child is afraid, not startled or apprehensive as when about to take a test or ride a roller coaster but paralyzed by that icy cold in the pit of her stomach, confused because she suddenly believes her parents cannot make it all okay. When

her. Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life. I bit my tongue hard enough to snap out of it. But not hard enough to injure myself.

“No, slug, it’s not really bad. Especially because we now know they’re happening. It’s as if you’re taking a tiny nap. Like a little short circuit in your brain.” (I was sorry I’d said “brain.” I was sorry I’d said “short circuit.”) “In a way we all have them from time to time. You’re just having a few more.”

alive. It was my job, my only job in life, to keep this creature alive, to keep this little bird breathing.

didn’t. I had sunk into a pessimistic wormhole, and, knowing I couldn’t extricate myself, I at least resolved to hide my fear.

I followed the red line on the floor to neurology. That unwavering, resolute red line. Situated between the blue and yellow lines, leading past the big fish tank, over the pedestrian bridge, having no meaning by its being red but meaning everything because it was red. I followed, chased, heeded the red line until it led me to my daughter.

There was no other way to say it, except of course that we were left to say it ourselves, though not out loud; that would have been too much. Our daughter was dying. My little Sarah would not survive this genetic defect. I was lost. Meg was lost. She couldn’t even blame me for what was happening. For her sake, I wished that she could have.

enough. In my mind, in my heart, I had not come into full existence until the birth of my daughter.

Dreams were not important; it was the reconstruction of dreams that was always significant. Therein

However, I became immediately irate, first because the decision had come so quickly as to appear an insult to our judgment and second because I was constitutionally disposed to find the actions of any dean or upper administrator suspect, ill considered, and wrong.

cerulean,

Why do people speak of things coming full circle? If a thing does not come full circle, then there is no circle at all. It is like past history or a hot water heater or end results. Things do not traverse a full circle of meaning so that we discover their proximity to their opposites.

She turned and stared at me. She did not know who I was in that moment. I died some. I died quite a bit. I sat beside her, looked around for danger.

There were times in life that things felt easy and slow, or easy and fast, somehow not the world of grown-ups, but everything now felt so hard, so real, every move an effort and a mystery, yet strangely, no move seemed as if it could be wrong. How

That word from her lips had been the most beautiful music of my life, and now I knew that I would probably never hear it again.

That night I sat alone with Sarah at the kitchen window.