Читать книгу Areas of Fog - Will Dowd - Страница 13

LATITUDES

I SPENT THE past two weeks flat on my back—the result of a slipped disc—and, consequently, my contact with the weather has been limited, though I did crawl from room to room each afternoon to lie in puddles of surprisingly warm sunlight like a cat, all the while staring at the ceiling and working fitfully on my living will, which a combination of boredom and the sudden simulacrum of old age spurred me to tackle.

It wasn’t so bad.

Eventually the random swirls on the ceiling assembled into compelling shapes, and of course there’s a quiet joy in planning one’s funeral.

Only last Monday, when I hobbled to the doctor’s office like the Elephant Man, did I directly experience the weather. At three o’clock the sun was already low, impaled on some branches. The sky was a filthy blue, and it was freezing out. My bare knuckles felt as if they were in a vice, though I barely noticed due to the summer lightning of nerve pain in my left leg. Funny how separate pains in the body vie for conscious attention like claimants to a medieval throne.

“Why is this happening?” I asked the nurse practitioner.

“Well,” she said, “your lumbar vertebrae have become compressed and—”

“No, I mean why is this happening to me?”

It’s the existential question that all New Englanders ask themselves in late January. We stand at (or lie beneath) a sunny window, attempting to bask in secondhand warmth, and ask ourselves the question: why is winter happening to me?

Why do I live here?

Voluntarily?

What complex web of self-sabotaging life decisions led me to take up residence at 42° North, a latitude which, if the Northern Hemisphere had a spine, would correspond roughly to the first lumbar vertebrae, the kidney-shaped bone giving me such trouble?

Come to think of it, why is there a winter at all?

Why does the Earth even teeter on its axis?

Why can’t it always be summer?

But these are childish questions. It’s no use arguing with the weather or trying to wish it away. Like a funeral, life goes on. Rain or shine.