Free Anything Can Happen by Roger Rosenblatt

the
Caicos
?" She explodes in laughter so shrill it scatters the fish.
    "Ashley, Ashley," she sighs woefully. "
Everybody
knows the Caicos. The Caicos are
it!
Tom Cruise goes there. Penelope Cruz is there right
now.
On a cruise. Claus von Bülow, Lizzie Grubman, Norman Mailer.
All
the best people. Look, I'm sorry. But if you've never heard of the Caicos, what's the point, I'd like to know, of us going on?"
    It is the moment I have dreaded. Shamelessly I beg her to stay with me. But I can see that she's ready to jump ship. It was plain from the start: She has her world, I mine.
    "Go," I tell her. "But stay dry."
    "Good-bye, Ashley," she says, and jumps overboard.
    For a minute or so I watch her swim toward shore, in her hat, the water beading—and immediately evaporating—on her swimsuit as she glides through the sea. Soon she is far away. I turn my yacht about and sail north. I am heartbroken, yet enlightened, and full of warm memories of our time together—while in the distance, with the sun full upon the sea, and the air as free as a dream, Ashley Montana goes ashore in the Caicos.

How to Live in the World
    These instructions come in French and Japanese as well, and in other languages, but don't let that throw you. Don't let anything about the enterprise throw you. You can do it, anyone can do it, because one really doesn't live in the world when it comes down to it (and it always comes down to it). Rather, one waits for the world to live in you—as a composer waits for rapture, and then becomes the life he seeks.
    But, if that sounds a bit abstract to you, a little hoity-toity, read that part of
Specimen Days
in which nurse Walt Whitman is attending the Union fallen and near-dead in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., which doubled as a hospital during the Civil War—where he notes, with barely a critical remark, that the same species capable of coming up with the most dazzling inventions made of wood and brass was just as capable of blowing off one another's limbs. The hall was filled with bright machines side by side with men on cots, massaging their new stumps.
    It is the way you feel when listening to national politicians speak of our great power and our powerful greatness while in your heart, you recall that still and airless afternoon in Africa, when you held an eleven-year-old in your arms shortly after he had died of starvation. Light as a feather. His last breath went out of him like a drop from a vial.
    So, how to live in the world? Wait till the end of the day, when the family of swans has sequestered itself under the drawbridge near the NO WAKE sign, and the light has stalled above the open mouth of the creek, so that the sun burns like a coal in ash, and the wind is a rumor on your face, your limbs, and you are filled with wonder and remorse. Then go treat the wounded.

Aubade
    Inseparable from the dark dawn, this white chair, stained brown-orange at the top of the back cushion, and the ink scratches on its arms. This yellow pad. This Bic without its top.
    This silence and these words that remain silent yet push and elbow

each other out of the way like Hollywood extras vying for attention. These dreams

that go forward and back, past scoundrels and geese in great flights and the outrages of history, which, since they are dreams,

become birds, then baseballs, then blues numbers and my dad in his kitchen, singing show tunes in his slippers.
    This morning, this life. One could die of happiness.

Instructions to the Pallbearers
    Use the casket for a planter. I never did like boxes. Instead, prop me up on a high place where I can face the water—a bay, not an ocean—so that boats may pass before my blind eyes, and the noise of children playing on a float may attack my deaf ears. Then leave me to rot. And, keep the worms away, if you can. Death ought to be different.

On the Other Hand
    On the other hand, rejoice. The heat from the fire has blistered the blue paint on your