Dankland stumbled in through the door of his lousy apartment, the stench of whisky trailing after him like a friendless dog, whimpering in the night air. The door slammed behind him.
HWAAK!
It was impossible to say if the sound merely startled him, or if it somehow managed to pierce the severe fog of his intoxication, providing him a brief moment’s pause in which to consider the facts of his condition. In either case, he remained stiffly standing in the apartment for a long time—-his shoulders raised in the air as if attached to marionette strings, his head slightly rolling around the axis of his neck in the unsuccessful attempt to keep straight.
It was the same posture that he wore at well-lit bars and office parties like a cheap starched suit, a posture which he mistakenly believed could conceal his own drunkenness. Not an unfamiliar thing, but still peculiar given the fact that he lived alone. In this instance it was, after all, a purely social affectation meant to charm an empty room.
With a limp, nearly paretic hand Dankland wiped his sweaty forehead and slicked back his hair. The clear sweaty oil made his face shine, dripping and slobbering, generously soaking the white dress shirt he wore with damp pools of black. He had the appearance of a last, half-vanished ice cube floating around the rim of a cup—-and it was in this same meandering fashion that he started walking a crooked line toward the light switch on the far wall.
Twisting his face, he began to slow dance through the room—-three steps forward, two steps back, a quick Manhattan shuffle, a half-pirouette, a quarter-gallop. In a moment of brief theatricality he even threw back his head, displaying it to the empty room like a lion shaking its mane-—in another moment he would have roared-—but instead, he accidentally hit his shin on the corner of his coffee table, and dropped to the ground like a stunned fish.
He moaned, loudly.
“I have decided to accept that I’m dead drunk, and I don’t give a fuck who knows it,” he announced, slowly bending to rub his injured leg. “Dead drunk. Dead as Lazarus.”
Adopting an alternative stratagem, Dankland held his hands out before him and very carefully groped his way toward the light switch. “Like the insects do,” he muttered. “Cockroaches and caterpillars and all the great blind geniuses—-Milton, Borges, Joyce, Homer, Willie Johnson, King Lear. How does that line from King Lear go? I feel it seeingly…no—-see it feelingly…well shit, however that goes.
“Bacteria are also blind, it occurs to me. They are creatures of feeling alone. They have no vision—they swill and swoon. How miraculous it is, the way that one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and eight become hundreds. Perhaps we are not so different, melting together and tearing apart like that. Didn’t old Jim Joyce say it himself: We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love…but always meeting ourselves.” His voice swooped into a long lonely mutter, drool slowly extending down his chin in one long unbroken string. “God help us, it’s true—we are always ourselves.” If he were not so drunk, he might have added: although we don't always know it.
A minute or two passed before, not unhappily, he discovered the light switch on the far end of the room. But as he reached to touch it with his finger, Dankland discovered that he was peculiarly hesitant. Denial is a sort of optimism best fortified with darkness-—its sanctity is trespassed at great peril. Clutching his chest in the darkness, he wondered if it would be wise to subject his fragile condition to the sight of anything so gloomy as his own life.
"Maybe it would be better just to leave the lights off," he mumbled, and laid down in the darkness, on the floor, and slept.
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