Party Tricks by Elliat Albrecht. Press play and begin.
He lit up like a used car lot. Like an amusement park. Like a chandelier shop. Like an exit sign. Like an incoming call. Like a homecoming crowd. Like a fifty year smoker. Like a birthday cake. We had one week.
Wednesday. He collected other people’s letters from thrift stores and kept them in boxes by his bed where he read them when he couldn’t sleep. His insomnia depended not at all on the earth’s rotation or what he ate, but entirely on the content of the news on the radio on the way home from work. Each time a broadcaster announced a tragedy without really hearing what they were saying, he sighed and one more tiny wrinkle appeared above his brow.
Monday. He liked to go for breakfast in the middle of the night. I looked at him across the table. He took a sip of water.
“My mother though,” he said, finally, “is an interesting story. She had me late in life and worked until she was old.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Mostly in restaurants, basement bars and at a factory outside of Detroit. That’s where she met my dad.” He didn’t offer more on the subject.
The table was chipped and sticky with syrup. I watched him fold and unfold his hands.
“What kind of factory?”
“They produced a certain type of drainage system used on pleasure yachts. Something for the
plumbing in the galley I think. It was all shipped to the coast.”
I told him that my grandparents had a sailboat that slowly circled a different Great Lake each summer.
“We grew up across the border from one another,” I said. “In different decades though, I guess.
Maybe that explains why we speak so similarly.”
“Do we?” he asked. “I hadn’t noticed. It seems like the only place where you hear regional accents anymore are cable talk shows.”
Saturday. I met him at a dinner party for the employees of a sleep clinic. The hosts were friends of my parents to whom I was introduced by e-mail before I left home that summer. He sat next to me in the dining room. He wore a white shirt and told me that nightmares account for six percent of dreams for those with normal vision, but twenty-five percent of the dreams of the blind. I dropped my fork on the floor and he passed me his. The generation gap closed when our hands touched. I told him the story of the Russian royals in hiding. He had a sister named Anastasia. Someone turned up dance music on the stereo down the hall. The guests wanted to stay up all night.
Tuesday. We lay on my bed flipping through a teen magazine talking about pop-feminism.
“The problems of Miley Cyrus pale in comparison to those of the women who make her clothes,” I said. He nodded and said he was dismayed that young people had already forgotten the revolution.
“Which revolution?” I asked dumbly. He looked over at me and launched into a tirade about the inevitable failure of inflated regimes. Something about Rome. Something about America. He performed his monologue on self destruction with good rhythm. I swear some of it rhymed.
Sometimes his anger was almost a sonnet. I zoned out.
When he finished, I told him that failure was the most fertile circumstance for possibility. Just after the moment of collapse, I pointed out, new realities are forced to life.
“There’s no organization in that,” he said.
“Does there have to be?”
“Always,” he said. “Humankind is a collection of impulses and habits and requires systems of arrangement to sustain.”
“William Blake said he must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s,” I answered. “Don’t you think life without risk is boring?”
“Tomb follows womb,” he said, and flipped the page. “It’s all the same in the end.”
Friday. He had an audacious hobby of writing personal ads for other people whom he thought were lonely. Sometimes the descriptions were grossly exaggerated, sometimes slightly undersold and sometimes right on the money. Once in a while, he’d open the paragraph with a revealing factoid or trait that would ultimately prove to be the most important part of a relationship.
“Jean gives up an average of forty-two minutes into an argument. She retreats into the bedroom where she would prefer to be left alone while you microwave your dinner. Early forties, loves to hike and try new things.”
He sent them to the local paper with photos attached of his beloved lonely hearts (and he really did do it out of love, he cared for them like kids alone at recess) taken at New Years Eve parties where a heavy flash startled their features but evened complexions in a flattering way.
Thursday. Once before I fell asleep, I left the door unlocked. He arrived with Pop Rocks, put them on his tongue and kissed me. I thought that was what fireworks tasted like. Sugary, blue.
Saturday. He was probably a genius but had a limited repertoire of moves. After he invited me to the amusement park, he forgot and took someone else. I wasn’t jealous, just mildly surprised by his laziness. I forgave it for the time that he told me his party trick was sitting at the piano at the end of the night, very drunk, a cigarette dangling from his mouth but I can’t remember the rest. Maybe something about sliding the keys. He pointed out that the figs in the backyard were ripe the last time I saw him. I sent him home with a box of four or five juicy fruits wrapped in paper. He told me later that they burst on the way home.
Figs courtesy of Elliat Albrecht. Music: We Move Lightly by Dustin O’Halloran.
