Free The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

coffee in thrift-store mugs, nights stretched on couches I wouldn’t want to lay a finger on. Playing jagged, noisy music on a crowded stage plastered with gaffer’s tape; tracing a finger along the outline of a girl’s tattoo at some dark, rowdy party. Arguing with landlords. Living on pasta and cereal. And somehow, through luck and work and miracle, becoming the man I saw on my computer screen, the man who lives in a house on the ocean with a gold record on his wall. The man whose tragedies are front-page news.
    I could have been a part of that long stretch of life if I’d tried harder. If I’d … what? Shown up on the doorstep of his mission-style house with a suitcase? Told him that the man in the moon was real? I don’t know where the magic line might have been. That’s how it is with children, or at least how it’s been with mine: you have chances and chances and chances. And then you have none.
    I walk along the streets surrounding Union Square, but I have no real destination. I remember reading that there’s a plaque somewhere around here, a plaque that was put up to mark the site where Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, was killed. A monument to a fictional event, a murder that never took place. In this present situation, I have no desire to track down such an artifact, but I like the idea that the stories we write can occupy that kind of space on our own physical plane. I’ve always hoped that my characters will outlive me, though in my darker moments I suspect my books aren’t important enough for that. Walking a still-empty block of Mason Street, I wonder how long anyone’s characters will last. Sooner or later we will bring this world to its end; that much seems all but certain. My own self dead, the demise of everyone I have loved—we all know to expect that. But the thought of an empty world, all our books waterlogged or turned to dust, with no eyes ever to see them again … it fills me with terror. The story to end all stories, and no one will be left to tell it.
    As the streets begin to repopulate themselves, I find myself trying to meet people’s eyes as they pass by. Just a single smile, a compassionate look, would mean so much to me. But they’re all good city dwellers and they keep their eyes to themselves.
    Solitude is a much more shaded condition than I used to think; it’s not just a matter of being alone or not alone. It would not be wrong to say that I’ve been alone for eighteen years (if we start counting from the time Mitch died) or nine years (since Milo moved out of our house to go to college) or four years (since the last time we spoke). But it would also not be entirely right. I’m not a hermit, though the isolated nature of my job means that I spend more time by myself than a lot of people do. Still, I teach writing classes; I meet friends for dinner; I get invited to take part in literary events. I visit my mother several times a year, and I’m in touch with a sprawling group of cousins and their children, some of whom are willing to serve as my informants on the rare occasions they hear anything from Milo. In the years since Mitch died, I’ve dated a few men (either four or five, depending on whether I’m counting the ill-considered night with the author of angel-themed mysteries that I met at a conference in Atlanta), a few of them almost seriously. I receive e-mail from readers, and I have daily opportunities to chat with neighbors and supermarket clerks. There are baristas who know me by name.
    But there’s no one to watch bad TV with, and no one to run to the drugstore when I’m sick. When something happens that strikes me as funny, it’s sometimes weeks before I find anyone who might like to hear the story. And when underpaid interns writing jokes for late-night talk shows build entire monologues around the topic of my son’s guilt, there’s not a fucking person on Earth who knows exactly what I’m feeling.
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    I stop at a coffee shop for a