Yesterday Afternoon

Yesterday was not what most people would call a lovely day. The flinty sky bore down on our gentle exurb with an abstracted, impersonal menace. The low rolling clouds spat a fitful mist that gave the lumpen automobiles and townhouses a secret sheen, as if all of this would crack away at any moment to reveal the real world, the promised pleasant fantasy of my youth. Magic that works and metallic ships that sail the void. It was on such days that as a boy I lost myself in the stacks of our town’s small public library. The walk through the mist into the heat, light, and life of the close squat building with its dim narrow corridors of possibility was a sacred mystery, my first rite. In a corner of my own next to dull brickwork and sweating pipes I delved and knew and dreamed. Yesterday afternoon the old feeling came over me and I decided to walk to the public library. I put on my engineered olive drab rain suit, packed my shoulder bag with pill bottles, pens, a notebook. I checked that my flask was full.

My first steps along the slick, pocked gray sidewalk were fraught with trepidation. This town is, after all, nothing like my childhood home, and I am not a child but a shuffling man-thing in indistinct repellent green. Not even off our block I was wheezing and feeling the new sharp pain. I pressed on into the shifting haze, and my vision did something strange. A sort of hole developed in my forward field of view, to the left and slightly upward. It was not blackness but something far more disconcerting. It felt as if in that area my brain was simply receiving no information to process. The visual anomaly began at the size of a tennis ball. I concentrated on the dull sidewalk before my scraping shoes. Looking down provided relief, and that is how I traveled to the library of my boyhood, focused shortly forward of my sharp thrusting toes as my small feet sawed the air. But yesterday I could not maintain that downward gaze. The hole in my vision kept drawing my eye as a freshly absent tooth draws the tongue.