Alec Niedenthal
Moon
My second wife in five years brought her hand to my hair.
She intended to point my head at the moon. I pressed her arm with my hand as if to consent, or in minor mourning. Or to press it. I bit that arm a little.
This was in a major city, cars and grey gouts of smoke going by, over a short bench without much to surround it. All of this activity blew her hand away from my hair. Or else she found no use for her hand there.
"Like this," she said.
"This moon out here," she said.
"I'm not sure what to say to you," she said.
Eventually she knew to locate the moon with her index finger. It looked bright, solid, and still the same as ever. A cannonball in ice.
"Yes," I said.
"This is what you remind me of," she said.
At once I thought of my father, who I thought was not appropriate to think of when such a thing is said.
I clutched tightly an empty paper bag from probably McDonald's. It wasn't mine. I had found it in the park and I kept holding it and occasionally I breathed into it for air.
I thought of him anyway.
Last spring I was hospitalized for a very long time.
That same night, we took the subway back to her low-rise apartment. Her roommate interrogated us. It was hard for him to believe we were married. I tapped on the parquetry with my shoes and I tapped on tables with my fingertips. She looked at him, in this interrogation, like he knew what went where.
"I don't believe in things like this ending," I said. I didn't. I was not sure of anything.
I know for a fact she slept with this roommate while we were together, or at least talked to him about it for an extremely long time. She was just trying to relax, she said.
We went to the roof and sat on the concrete, looked at the moon and they described it in certain terms.
"It's so big," they would say, "and so bright."
You always have to climb a long, long ladder to get to this roof, and it frightened me. A lot of the time I couldn't do it.
I thought I might send my wife and roommate to the moon. They would be happy there, I thought. I stood up. When I lifted my palms they were black. There is altogether no reason to be on the roof.
"My father used to take me out to see the moon," I said.
"Like on dates?" my wife's roommate said.
"No, you fucker," I said.
The roommate and my wife went back inside. I could hear them tinkling down the ladder.
"Goodbye, Jerry," my wife said.
I began to dread eventually climbing down that ladder alone.
The moon got covered in black rain clouds. I wiped my hands with my shorts, sighed in agitation. I missed everybody so slightly.
I fell off the roof, then. It wasn't a long fall.
That it's so high is one of the main disadvantages of being on a roof.
I thought I was going to freeze where I was. Even though it wasn't so cold. Now it's different. Now I'm drowning.
My wife visited me in the hospital. The roommate did, too. They visited together, always right after some phlegmy meal.
"We're sorry," they said.
"What for?" I said.
I won't lie. They had a lot to be sorry for. They'd brought me up so high in the first place.
This was shortly before I fell out of the third story window of the hospital. Not long, I suppose, before I stopped talking.
