Pillow Talk

He couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but it didn’t seem to matter much. It looked like their house, but it didn’t appear the way he used to imagine it would look from up in the top of the huge spruce – where he always meant to climb. He recognized their red steel roof, but it was just too far below. He remembered a long time ago, watching late night TV and then all of a sudden, his eyes would wig-out and the whole TV would shrink to dinky, like it was fifty feet away. He knew his eyes had just been tired. It’d just been time to shut the idiot box off.

Up, from wherever he was looking down through their red steel roof, he didn’t remember when he'd made their bed, but he could see it was. It was just a little, modest double. She’d had a habit of crowding him at night with her furnace presence and he’d wake up sweating - which wouldn’t have happened if they’d had a King. But she never would hear of any kind of distance between them. He was glad now; he didn’t have to make the giant bed he used to be so sure he wanted.

Up, wherever he was, it came back to him now, how he’d just got done making their bed again. This time, he’d stopped and stood in their bedroom doorway and looked back at it. Long time now, there had been only one forlorn little pillow.

Up, wherever he was, far as he could tell, high as the top of the big spruce, he still couldn’t imagine what he was seeing at all. At least he was closer now. But how could he be seeing down through their steel roof and into their attic again? It weirded him out. It’d been a lo-o-ong time, but his hands had built every square inch of their house. He should know what he was seeing. Maybe his problem was just the distance.

Back when he’d retired, after they moved to the coast, he and his wife looked at each other and almost in unison, warned, “I don’t want to build a house with you.”

Did anyhow: acted as their own General Contractor, Architect, Interior Designer, even crew. Eons after they’d finished their house, at a garage sale, she got a really nice, old fashioned cable-fed anemometer. That endless summer was tailing off and she’d wanted to be able to measure the speed of the coming Winter storms right when the harshest gusts were thundering and slapping their bedroom windows with rain, right before her lightning would strike him.

After breakfast and a lotta coffee, to install her anemometer cable, and to avoid messing-up the drywall of their bedroom ceiling, he’d drug the cable into their tomb-like, bedroom attic. She tried to stop him. She said she could just re-sell the anemometer, but he couldn’t stand her not having whatever she wanted.

Way back in the 1990s, an article in Smithsonian Magazine had posed the question, “What should a man of eighty expect from himself?” He’d learned that with enough coffee, the answer was, “...quite a bit.”

He was eighty-one when he climbed into the attic with her anemometer cable. Starting clear way over outside the bathroom door, he positioned his ladder under the attic access hatch. His knees didn’t like ladders, but he adjusted his LED head lamp and started aloft. Trying to orient himself, he lifted his weight into the darkness of the attic. He saw the beam of his head lamp play way back in there amongst the shadows and criss-crossing framing where he would be spelunking. In that direction, over above their bedroom, he knew the crawl clearance would become vanishingly small.

 And it did, but knee-padding back into the attic, forced to put his weight only on the joists, was like doing non-stop push-ups. If he dropped his weight onto the drywall spanning between the joists, the weak, gypsum material would break and he’d be stuck fixing the ceiling down there for a week. He bridged his body rigidly - truss to truss. He started to sweat. The going got claustrophobic. Then, he realized he’d left the end of the anemometer cable somewhere behind him. In what felt like an endless push-up-bridge-up position, he reversed, walking his knees back over three trusses. He’d dropped the cable end only six feet back, but he was perspiring hard now; salt sweat burned his eyes and dripped onto the inside of the lenses of his reading glasses. The brightness of his head lamp turned the unlit shadows impenetrably black. He fumbled with the bitter end of the cable.

 The going got worst at his destination over their bedroom. He’d forgotten the complexity of the roof framing just above their bedroom door. He had to worm his way. On his belly, exhaling hard to shrink his chest, he’d just barely extruded himself through into the area above their bedroom where he planned to lead the cable out onto the roof, when he felt the sharp stab of his right hamstring cramp and shorten-up and double his now useless leg.

 He couldn’t move. Below him in their bedroom, he could hear the worry in her muffled voice – demanding something, something, something – he couldn’t tell what. Worse, his teeth started to float. It wasn’t like he was in a coffin, though. In a coffin, you’re on your back, resting.

Before his head-lamp batteries died, he had a long time to just lay there and try to massage his hamstring and study the Engineer’s Certification Stamp on the roof truss that insisted right in front of his face - before the tip of her rescuing keyhole saw appeared from below, cutting an escape opening through the drywall of their bedroom ceiling.

Suddenly now, up wherever he was, thinking back about the anemometer cable, he understood more of what he was seeing: it was a sky-view of the patch she’d installed nearly ten years ago in the drywall of their bedroom ceiling. Made him plenty mad when she did it.  She said there was a good reason the Smithsonian article stopped at eighty. She’d been right. At eighty-one, he had been past his pull date.

Now, right down through her ceiling patch, he could see his pillow – small, rectangular, crumpled - and isolated – like he was out over the ocean, flying in a search plane – exactly like he’d just spotted a speck survival raft – only his pillow - the raft - was alone and empty.

He’d had a lumpy pillow for years now – like full of dryer balls. He felt powerless to fluff it anything like she had. Even when he made her mad sometimes, and she slept it off downstairs, she left his pillow fluffy. It was never fluffy any more. He wasn’t up to that. His pillow was just forlorn. But none of it seemed important any more. Why should it?

But, what? He saw something for sure worth descending to look at. Way down there, he could see his own, unshaven mug now, facing up toward him. It was true. He knew he should have shaved, and here his depressed sloppiness was, blowing up in his face like a Pringles can crammed with spring-loaded gag snakes. And, too, he recognized the back of the woman’s head he was seeing above his own face. He knew the cancer scar at the crown of her head, the one she tried to hide with the rest of her hair. She hadn’t in years, but now it looked like she was trying to wake him up. From over her shoulder, he could see that both her hands were shaking his body anxiously.

He knew she would be asking him something. But after ten years, where had she come from? She would want to know why she found him lying on the bare floor at their bedroom door. She deserved an explanation. There was no carpet at their bedroom door to sleep on. It was just hard maple. He would have to tell her he just didn’t know why she found him sleeping there.

Finally, up wherever he was, he decided to go back down and put her heart to rest. It seemed to him, he should know what his pillow was doing on the floor outside their bedroom door. He went down and picked it up and tried to fluff it. He kneaded the dryer balls extra so she wouldn’t think he didn’t care anymore. He couldn’t stand her thinking that. He carried his pillow around and placed it in his normal spot – there on the far side of their bed. Last, he went in the bathroom and shaved.

It felt really good to crawl back alone into their bed all set to go.